The Challenges of Naming a Baby
I would love to have another child, and even another daughter. I already had a name for her until I saw a listing of popular baby names around the world. I guess I won’t be naming my daughter Sophie. I prefer unique names, and if I named a future daughter Sophie, she’d be sharing the name with many babies around the world. It is currently ranked #4 in England, # 2 in Germany and New Zealand, and the Sophie derivative Sophia was #5 in last year’s U.S. baby girl names .
There’s been numerous psychological studies that link names and people’s perceptions of them. For instance, what do you immediately think of when you hear someone is named Loser or Winner? Positive or negative thoughts? What about names like Temperance, or Charisma, or Cookie?
Do you know of anyone who has named their child something that the child as an adult legally changed? I do. And how about giving children extra long names that are dropped along the name for sheer impracticality? I would be an example of that last one.
Names definitely mean a lot, and parents are known to battle it out until well after the baby has arrived. It’s important to take in many considerations when naming the baby. The considerations could be uniqueness, future trauma the child may experience for being saddled with a ridiculous names (like Desiree Excaltacion — that would be my aunt, who demurred to be called Day instead). Other considerations include naming after older family members but making it sound more modern, or preferring traditional sounding names like Michael for a boy and Emily for a girl.
For those who’ve picked a name but don’t know whether it’s a right one, follow this one simple tip I read somewhere. Open the door to the backyard, yell the name in question 10 times. If by the end of it all, you still like the name, then it’s a keeper. But you’ll probably be yelling it a lot more than 10 times in the future!
