Baby-Name Regret

We've all heard of buyer's remorse, but how about baby-name remorse? Apparently, quite a lot of parents regret the names they give to their children:

In a recent poll of 1,219 mothers conducted by BabyCenter.com, 10 percent considered changing their baby's name. The reasons they gave ranged from being inspired by another name to having a relative disagree with the choice.

Regret is common after any big decision, and few prenatal decisions these days are as open to debate as picking a child's name. Rare are the parents who haven't invested in a small library of baby-name books or trolled the Internet for a name unique enough to be usefully Googled, but not so weird as to cause ridicule.

"Today, there's this perception that naming a child is almost like naming a product -- there's this huge national drive now to not be like anyone else," says Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" and founder of the blog BabyNameWizard.com.

I wonder if the parents of these kids ever got baby-name remorse ... Link - Thanks Tiffany!


Just name your son Aiden, Brayden, Caiden, Jayden, one of their endless spelling variants, or anything that rhymes with those and you are all set for the kid to be like all the others in his school. Yawn.

I hate new-fangled names... Name your kid after a British monarch and be done with it.
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I had the good fortune to have been born a girl ... had I been born a boy, my parents would have named me Israel Pierre. I think that is one of the worst combos of otherwise conventional first and middle names.
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Ooh, thanks for the link Scott K! Go for the Best 25 of the Worst Baby Names list, from the same website, here: Link

An excerpt:

2. Toolio
Pretty sure it's a joke, but who cares! It's friggin' practical compared to some of the others.

3. Tierrainney
I think this name is so densely packed with letters it will soon implode on itself, creating a star to rival our own sun.

12. Blaze
I got an e-mail a while back from a lady who said she gave her potential baby names a test: did they fit better in the sentence, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States [blank] [blank]" or "And now, on the main stage, the Lusty Beaver Adult Club presents the hot action of [blank] [blank]." I think hospital forms should be reformatted to force parents to do just that.

17. Kaytaquana and others
I don't know what the hell is going on here. Most of the list is entirely random, but Kaytaquana gets extra credit for appearing to be a name-ization of katakana, a Japanese alphabet.
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I think we found a good balance for our son between yuppie smart-ass names (like Brayer) and ultra-common names (David). Around the 5th month of pregnancy we were struggling to agree on one, and while watching the History Channel one night, saw a show about 3 Mile Island. It had that (in)famous footage of Jimmy Carter walking through the nuclear plant and I just casually said, "What about 'Carter'"? Bam! Done. Far from being the best president ever, but a great man of peace and wisdom and reason. We could have done so much worse.

Oh, and we totally did the "read the name aloud in different situations", too! Ours were, 1. a prison sentencing, 2. Nobel Prize winner announcement, & 3. baseball player over a P.A.
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I changed my dog's name twice. Her prison/animal shelter was Missy. Since she had been abused at one point, we decided to call her Penny after Janet Jackson on Good Times but that didn't stick. She's been a Jenny for 3 years and will remain so.

Another reason for me happily not to reproduce.
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I have 3 children and the only 1 I really regret is my oldest son, Calvin. Its a good name but I aloud my husband 2 name him and so he picks his favorite rapper, snoop doggy dogg! My middle daughter I picked Kiara because it was a character on my sons favorite movie, lion king 2 and I thought and still think its a beautiful name! At the time not common either but that soon changed! As for my youngest daughter she is Alexia and we call her Lexi or Lex 4 short, which is also a very common name now!
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Heh, my husband and I had picked out a name for a boy and a girl long before I became pregnant, and the names are based on family names. I have a weird enough name (apparently my first and middle names are family names, but impossible to pronounce or spell for many people), so I didn't want to saddle my kid with something he'd be made fun of for life. Since we know it's a boy, his name will be George Preston Alexander (lastname). Yes, he gets two middle names. It's easy to remember, simple, and honors my grandfather whose name was George, and my husband's family where Preston and Alexander are family names.

If we were having a girl, it'd be Ellen Rose (lastname). I like classic names...heh.

I worked at a daycare a few years back and had one child in my class whose name was Dainjer Robinson. His mother was a huge Lost in Space fan and ended up marrying a man whose last name was Robinson. The father objected to the child's middle name being Will (or William), so I think it was something like David. But this poor kid is stuck with Dainjer for the rest of his life....
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