Inspired by the thread on carrying on the family surname.
There have to be people who felt pressured to name their child after a relative, or people who chose a name they didn’t really like as a compromise, or who fell out of love with a name after they’d already given it to their child.
How do you feel about your kids’ names?
I’m still happy with the choices. We selected traditional names, without any odd spellings (we figured they should be “special” by their actions, not some goofy name or spelling).
As far as family names, we decided those could be middle names. There wasn’t any pressure to use those, but we felt it was worthwhile to honor some of the family history that way.
I like my daughter’s name. She didn’t end up with the nickname I’d hoped for, but that was kind of inevitable.
We chose a less common spelling, which fits in with our family’s cultural background. I’m not sure if that was a mistake or not. With a long name, I figure that people are going to ask to spell it out anyway. I have one of the most common names in America and I have to spell it most of the time.
I do. Both of them. My older son bears my mother’s maiden name as his first name and his dad’s first name as his middle name. It fits him well and he likes it well enough that he named his son a Junior. My younger son has a German family first name and my dad’s first name as his middle name. He used to hate his name as a kid because it was different from everyone else’s and no one knew how to say or spell it, but once he grew up and grew into it, he likes his, too. As an adult, he’d rather be unique than one of the multitude.
Yes, but…
Yes - great names, easy one-syllable nicknames that suit them each.
But - their names have the same vowel sound, e.g., Stan and Pam. So when we call then up in their rooms, the other inevitably calls out “ME?!” So we end up saying “Boy!” and “Girl!” They both like it - when my son leaves me notes about things, he signs them “Boy.”
Yes and I believe it is a both a personal and relationship failure if you have kids that don’t have names that you at least like. I can imagine how that would happen but none of those circumstances are good. I put a moratorium on using family names at all for my children and my then-wife agreed. We just went through the baby names book until we found something that we both liked for our first daughter. I was a little more insistent on her name but my wife went along with it and it turned out to be a great choice. It was later good enough for the English royal family. I was a little bit more hesitant for my other daughter because I was afraid that her name would be too trendy and popular and it is but it also a classic English name. They both got middle names that aren’t meaningful to anyone but are classic as well. It was all about how well everything fit together.
If I had a boy, it would have been more complicated. All firstborn males in my family including me have the same first name and go by our middle name. That rule has been in existence for hundreds of years and I am not sure I would want to break it.
Love all three of them. Oddly enough, I once learned that British novelist Margaret Drabble has three kids with the same three names (but not the same order). With minor changes they would have been common names in biblical times.
We didn’t name after relatives. Our kids have good names.
Like them both. My son’s first name is that of a president my wife and I both admire, and his middle name is my wife’s maiden name. My daughter’s first name is a name my wife and I both liked, and her middle name is my grandmother’s first name.
Like both of our sons’ names. Both seem to fit them in a “Yup, he’s a [name]” sort of way. My older son has my first name as his middle name in the grand family tradition but both first and middle name sound good together. The younger son’s middle name is Kusi, which is the Quechua word for happiness or joy, as a nod to my wife’s ancestry.
My wife picked out a name that I was not enamored with so we kept looking. We settled on a name we both liked and that became my daughter’s first name. The name my wife originally liked became her middle name and I actually did like the cadence of the full name so that was a win win. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the name we picked was the feminine form of my father-in-laws name.
Most importantly, my daughter likes her name. Given the number of people I know who don’t really like their names that makes me happy. I can always look back and think, “Regardless of all the other mistakes that we may have made, we did at least one thing right.”
I like them both, son and daughter. Before our son was born my wife and I went round and round and round and just could not agree on a boy name. It took a long time and a few different books before we found something we could both liked. It’s a pretty common name, and we both grew to like it even more over time.
We had immediately agreed on a girl name, which we then carried forward when our daughter was born. I’m not super crazy about the nickname my wife uses for her, but it’s cute.
I can’t tell you the number of people I met with names that have nothing to do with their actual name.
In my office, I have Jack - Real name Fred
Pamela - > Toby
Joyce -> Jude
I was like how do you get these “nicknames” from your real name. The answer is always, “Oh my mother just started calling me that when I was little.”
Yes, I do. But I chose them so I should. I’m the only person in the world who calls both sons by their full names, which saddens me a bit.
We worked very hard to find just the right names for the girls to the point that they were twin one and twin two for nearly a week after they were born. The NICU nurses badgered us endlessly to come up with names…they were 3 weeks early so we were unprepared. Then we had to come up with middle names which took so long I was fined by the Quebec government for not registering their births in a timely manner.
I think they both have good strong names…nothing cutesy that will haunt their adult lives. Their middle names are names that I’ve always liked but didn’t want to be their first names because they were already in use in the family. One twins names represent in some way my Anglo Saxon heritage and one my husband’s Russian heritage…and she even looks just like him.
One twin actually had a version of the other’s name for a few days but we changed our mind and it’s funny now to note that each of their names would not have suited the other if we had switched the order.
As for how they feel about their names, one goes by a nickname I’ve never liked for her name sonI have to grit my teeth every time one of her friends calls her that and the other spent a whole summer at camp going by her middle name. She got to reinvent herself and no one was the wiser. Since then she’s tried changing her name several times. She would sign a test paper with her “new” name and teachers were always baffled trying to figure out who the new kid was.
My grandfather was in that situation – his name was Vincent John, but everyone in his family called him Jimmy. Even he didn’t know why. At family reunions, I have to say I’m “Jimmy’s granddaughter” because none of the extended family knows who Vincent (or Vinnie, what he called himself) was.
Oddly enough, as an adult my mother became good friends with a woman whose father was also named Vincent but called Jimmy. No one in that family knew why, either.
Unless there’s a surprise none of my hypothetical kids have names I don’t like. I, however, fo have the one name my mom said she would never name a son.
it was a pretty common name on dad’s side including his name. The circumstances of my birth left her in the hospital for 6 weeks. Her parents and my dad were in the hospital afterwards with her half out of it. The issue of a name came up and she was half out of it. Finally my grandparents came up with as solution. First name from a specific level of relation on dad’s side with the middle name after the first name of the parallel relative on their side. It sounded good. She agreed. Nobody really connected the dots in front of her. When she was finally doing better she asked what I’d been named… :smack:
Yeah, pretty much so. The only one I would change is my son’s middle name. Not sure why we picked the one we did, other than that we thought it sounded good with his first name and made decent initials. But the name is not particularly interesting, doesn’t mean anything to us. Wish we had been more creative.
The other thing we probably would have done differently is, we didn’t realize that the one-syllable shortened versions of all 3 were rhymes. If we had thought it out, we might have chosen names that were more differentiated - Dick and Jane, as opposed to Larry and Mary.
I like my daughter’s names but…
First a bit of context: my wife comes from a different continent and a very different cultural background. While she was educated in a European school and has mostly “Western” values (she hates it when I say that but knows it’s true), she’s intransigent about a few things related to her birth culture. So, we were going to give our children names that reflected her cultural background. Full stop.
First daughter: That was easy, I had absolutely no say in choosing her name. It was going to be her grandmother’s name (the name of my wife’s mother). I just had to agree to it. Anything else would have been a dealbreaker and she had made that clear years before our first daughter was born.
I kind of like her name but there’s absolutely no chance, zero, that I’d have chosen it in different circumstances.
Second daughter: I did get to choose it… as long as it reflected my wife’s birth culture. I came up with about half a dozen possibilities, my wife picked her favourite three out of that group and I was tasked with making the final decision. I often say that the name chose me because one night, when my wife was still pregnant, I talked about the baby and spontaneously used one of the names that we were considering - which was favourite anyway 
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I really like her name but again, it’s highly unlikely I’d have chosen it with a different partner. Highly unlikely but not completely impossible unlike my first daughter’s name.
My daughter’s name is not common, but it is traditional and really pretty. She was the ONLY one in her whole school with that name.
If fact, I’ve never met a person with her name, though I’ve heard of a few that I don’t know.