Reply to Wild Card Names

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Wild Card Names"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I mean, people can name their kids whatever they want. I absolutely did not want to name my kids some boring common name in the top 20 or 50. I didn’t want them to have to be Henry L. or Sophie T. or one of the 12 Jacks in the grade. Ask any Jennifer how she feels. I also didn’t do made up/inventive spelling names. I’ll be honest because this is anonymous — those seem uneducated to me. But I don’t care what other people choose. [/quote]

This has been explained on these boards a million times but there's no equivalent to Jennifer today. The top names are not anywhere close to as popular as the top names of the 70s or 80s. Which doesn't mean you should name your kids Henry and Sophia, but just to say that the fear many Gen X and older Millenial parents have about this issue is unfounded -- your chances of encountering even a top 10 or top 5 name is actually relatively low these days when compared to your odds of encountering a Jennifer in pretty much any classroom in America in 1985.

I just took a look at the top 10 names on the SSN site out of curiosity, and while I know kids under age 18 with 7 of the 20 top ten names (5 boys and 2 girls), I only know one of each -- no duplicates. I have two kids in elementary school (grades 1 and 5) so I've encountered a lot of kids in the last decade or so, plus all my nieces and nephews, friends kids, etc. With girls in particular, there is just a lot of variety and you could easily give your kid a top 20 or 50 name and never have to go by a nickname or be Henry L. or whatever.

I'd also think this should decrease the appeal of the creative spelling names because you don't need to alter the spelling of even a popular name in order to make it more unique (which is why I assume people do this) -- your kid's name is likely to be fairly unique even with the most common spelling.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics