When did we get so obsessed with unique baby names? [View all]
When my sister was pregnant with her children, she had a single rule: They could not, under any circumstances, have “trendy” names. Unquestionably adorable options like Theodore, Oliver, Charlotte, and Nora were vetoed over their rankings on the Social Security Administration’s annual list of the most popular names in the US.
She had a perfectly good reason: When she was born, in 1989, my parents named her Emily not only because they liked it, but also because they didn’t know of anyone else with the name. Within a few short years, however, Emily would become the single most popular name for baby girls, a title it held for more than a decade. “Everyone could spell and pronounce it, but it wasn’t terribly common,” a baby name book author recently explained on the abundance of Emilys, proving that even when parents try their best to project a sense of originality onto their children, it’s sometimes the least original choice they could have made.
Baby names, it seems, have never been more crucial to get right. On TikTok, a slew of creators have built followings of tens of thousands discussing baby name trends, and crucially, baby names to avoid because they’re trendy. They reveal baby names they liked but didn’t use, and baby names they never want to see again; they predict famous influencers’ baby names (sometimes with terrifying accuracy) and what names will soon be all over every daycare’s class list. Baby name inspiration TikToks have gone ever more niche: You can find viral videos that suggest “old money” names (Caroline, Elizabeth, Charlotte), “main character” names (Blaze, Arrow, Falcon), or “aesthetic” names (Rowan, Wren, Atlas). Their accounts are called things like @WhatsInABabyNameDoula, @NamingBebe, @DreamBabyNames, and @NamesWithSteph, many of whom now have paid consulting businesses where they help parents-to-be make one of the biggest choices of their lives.
Colleen Slagen, the nurse practitioner behind @NamingBebe, says that she’ll sometimes get comments from people asking why anyone in their right mind would pay someone else to name their baby. “For some people, [baby naming] is naturally a fun process, and for others, it’s actually very stressful, because they haven’t spent the last 30 years of their lives thinking about baby names,” she explains. She’s been obsessed with baby names for as long as she can remember; in elementary school she’d fill journals with the names of her future children and discuss her favorites with her sister. She offers three packages: a video consultation with 16 baby name options for $99, an eight-name package with extensive name analysis for $175, and 16-name package with name analysis for $250. So far, she estimates she’s done close to 100 consultations, some with people who weren’t even expecting a child at the time. “I think it’s fun to have someone analyze you and your partner’s taste and come up with something that suits you,” she says. “It’s a form of flattery.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/23708179/unique-baby-names-2023-trends-tiktok
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