A study in the US has revealed that, when choosing their baby’s name, parents are most likely to go for something that marks their child out from the rest.
Choosing a name for your baby can be fun. It can also be traumatic if the parents fail to agree. Either way, however, it’s definitely a tricky business.
A lot of mums and dads resort to baby name books or lists of the most popular babies’ names to help them decide what name to give their child. But what about those who choose less popular names?
A study to be presented on Saturday 23rd May in San Francisco, USA, indicates that these days the tendency when choosing a child’s name is not to go for one of the most prevalent of the moment, but rather one that will make our child stand out. In other words, «unique is popular.»
According to daily national newspaper USA Today, the study, carried out by psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell based on data gathered from 325 million Americans between 1880 and 2007, demonstrates the growing trend to choose little- (or even un-) known names for our children.
Nowadays, it is not just stars of stage and screen who choose unusual or distinctive names for their sons and daughters. Names like Apple, the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, Rumer, of mega-famous parents Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, or Shiloh, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s first born, are not necessarily more common but do denote a growing tendency in the US for choosing baby names that stand out from the masses.
The same could be said of Suri, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ daughter. The name supposedly comes from the Hebrew for «princess» but in Israel it’s the first time they’ve heard of it. Undeniably out of the ordinary.
As a result of the new trend, the percentage of boys and girls with names in the annual top ten list of the most popular is falling with each year. As stated by the study, in 1955 32% of boys and 22% of girls had names that were within the top ten most popular. By 2007, these figures had fallen to 9% and 8% respectively.
In other research carried out by the US National Academy of Arts, Sciences and Engineering (NAASE) the same trend was found in France by studying information from the period 1900 to 2004.
According to psychologists, the choice of these types of names reflects a growth in individualism which, they warn, can lead to narcissism. So I ask myself, are we Basques narcissists? What names were you thinking of for your child?
Jun 092009