Reply to If you were going to name your existing child today, would you change their name?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We named our daughters well and were smart enough to use SSA name trend data to avoid HarperAvaSophiaOlivia. [b]To be honest Im not sure why so many supposedly educated couples still pick something that's been in the top 20 for several years and then get all mad when there are one or two other kids in their kid's class with the same name.[/b] I mean, the data has been published every year for decades.[/quote]
This sounds super judge-y, PP. To be honest, DH and I also checked the SSA name trend data and looked up every name we were considering. We both had very common names growing up and there were always multiple kids in each of our classes that shared our names. We really wanted to give our kids names that would be theirs and not something they would need to use their last initial with all the time. But I don't blame people for not knowing it exists or checking it before choosing their kid's name. I'm not sure everyone would pick a unique name for their kid, even if they did use SSA to know which names were in the top 20. You choose a name for your kid based on all sorts of factors and the popularity of the name might not be high on a couple's priority list as a reason not to use a name, even if they'd prefer not to have one of 4 Olivias in a class. Or maybe they didn't realize how much of a pain it would be to yell "Noah!" across a playground and have 3 kids respond. We can't anticipate everything about the names we pick for our kids, including how the popularity (or lack thereof) of their name might play out in day-to-day life. Let's not judge each other over SSA data.

There are also names that might be common in sub-communities, but not reflected in SSA data. There are a ton of Ashers in my Jewish community's preschool right now.[/quote]

I also just don't hear parents complaining about top 10 names being too common. Most people I know who used a top 10 name went in with eyes open, knowing the name would likely be more common, but choosing it anyway because they wanted to (they loved the name, and often, the child was named for a relative with the same name).

What I hear more often is parents who use a name outside the top 20 or so, and it winds up being more common in their area than they thought. I've seen that happen more than once, and I have empathy for it. Like your Asher example, there are definitely little micro trends in every area and you can't always anticipate them, especially for a first-born child since brand new parents don't get the benefit of knowing lots of babies/toddler and their parents, and therefore being privy to the local baby name trends.

I love my DD's name and I think it's just right for her, but I laugh to myself sometimes because almost every single name on our short-list of 6 names has been the name of a child in one of her various classes. This includes names in the 600s and 800s on the social security list. I had thought the names were original and special to me, but I was obviously tapped into some kind of zeitgeist because despite their relative obscurity nationally, every one of those names is part of a micro trend in my area. Somewhat surprisingly, the name we wound up choosing is a top 50 name and we've only ever met one other kid with that name and it was just a random child on a playground we rarely go to -- no other kids with that name in our daycare or elementary. Go figure.[/quote]

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