Choosing a name for your baby is surely one of the loveliest aspects of being pregnant. All that leafing through name books, saying them aloud whilst trying to imagine a little personality to match the moniker, and the fun of keeping friends and family guessing as to your choice of name. Not to mention that utterly delicious moment at some stage after the baby is born, in which you finally match your baby’s face to his or her name for the very first time, and settle once and for all on what your child will be called. Magical.
But this week Bounty Parenting Club released a top 20 list of the most unusual baby names and, it has to be said, they’re anything but magical. (Apologies to anyone intending to call their offspring Zowie, Puppy or Ice.)
Faye Mingo, spokeswoman for Bounty said: “It’s great to see parents being creative and wanting their children to stand out from the crowd with more unusual names but there are a few names here that children may find hard to live up to!”
Hmm. Is it really great? More than one in 10 of the parents polled by Bounty said they regret their decision to choose an unusual name, and one in 10 said their child doesn’t like their own name. A further third of parents said they get frustrated that people often struggle to pronounce their child’s name correctly, and a fifth acknowledge their child would probably have an easier ride at school if they had a traditional name like Sarah or James.
The poll also shows that 75 per cent of parents who chose to give their child a traditional name such as Robert, David or Jennifer believe that parents who choose more alternative names are paving the way for their children to be bullied. And six in ten say those who choose wacky names are being selfish and aren’t thinking of the child.
So, without further ado, here are the top 20 most unusual names: Shy, Unity, Bean, Zowie, Puppy, Ice, Victory, Porsche, D’Andre, Denim, Diesel, Armani, Rooney, Bowie, Cobain, Echo, Heaven and Maroon.
And if you’re with child yourself and seeking inspiration, here’s a helpful guide to what NOT to name your baby. But surely naming your baby is one of the domains of life in which no-one else’s opinion should matter? The idea that I ought to have consulted the internet for its wisdom on what not to call my children gets me all irritated. Grrr.
Haute Mama founder Fiona agrees: “The name you choose for your child is such a meaningful and personal decision. What other people think shouldn’t influence you too much. I know of parents who gave each child a name that begins with the same letter. Friends have five girls called Amy, Alison, Anna, Aifric & Aoibhe, and another family opted for Pearl, Ruby, Jade & Amber, all of which are beautiful to me.”
“As for the names of our own children, we found the name Amelia in a baby book and thought it worked well with Rae, which is a family name. I was really keen for her to be known as Amelia-Rae, not just Amelia. I remember when I told one friend the name we had chosen she burst out laughing and said it sounded so ‘hill-billy’! I must admit I was a bit taken aback but I guess she must have been thinking about Billy Ray Cyrus! I was a bit concerned about the name sounding a bit pretentious. Do hyphenated names have that effect on people?! But I was really keen to keep the name ‘Rae’ an integral part of her name. With my son, Quinn, was the only boys name we could agree on. We had the idea that an Irish name would be nice, but one which my husband’s Canadian family could spell. So Quinn it was. Of course, shortly thereafter I got addicted to Glee where the lead pregnant teen is called Quinn. My husband was unimpressed!”
We’ve been debating if there’s a gender issue here too. Do girls somehow ‘get away’ with less conventional names compared to boys? Plus many girls’ names that might be considered unusual these days are actually quite traditional names from a bygone era. Think flower-inspired names like Poppy, Lily and Dahlia.
Possibly the best piece of advice I’ve heard on the subject of naming your baby is to imagine what your chosen name looks like on a CV, aged 25 applying for a job.
What do you think? Did you choose an unconventional name for your child and if so, why? Do you agree that an unusual name can single a child out as a potential victim for bullies? And most importantly of all, has anyone ever actually met a child called Shy or Puppy?!
The piece also recounts the advent of a new social media application called My Pregnancy, which allows people to track all the details of your baby’s in-utero existence. Brrrr. I actually shivered as I wrote that. It just strikes me as kind of creepy. I’m an old fashioned gal at heart and I can’t shake the feeling that pregnancy happens on the inside for a reason – not on the outside as an appendage for the world to prod and scrutinise. Once upon a time pregnancy used to be a mysterious and secretive process – remember the days when parents-to-be saw the 20-week scan as an opportunity to check that their baby was developing healthily, not as an indicator for whether they should paint the nursery pink or blue?! Or when all we really knew about a developing unborn child was that they took 9 months to be ready for the world, before the advent of those faintly terrifying week-by-week emails you can get from parenting websites which delight in telling you that this week your baby is developing teeth! And is the size of a small apple! Shriek! And brrr again. Am I the only person who spent that week of my pregnancy haunted by visions of giving birth to an apple with teeth? And while I’m on the subject, WHY do they choose to equate the size of your baby with food? One week I distinctly remember reading that my baby was just big enough to fit inside a teacup, and I just couldn’t stomach my usual beloved cuppa without the fear that a small child might be lurking at the bottom.
birth to their babies by elective c-section, not for medical reasons but simply because, well, they were supposedly too posh to push. Now it looks like we’re about to witness the emergence of a whole new category of celebrity-inspired parenting: Too Famous To Feed.
Denise is also quoted as saying: “Another time, I was at the back of a really long queue at the Post Office to get Betsy a passport, knowing that in the next half-hour she was going to wake up and cry, wanting a feed.” Most new mums have been there, and it must be seriously horror-inducing when you’ve got the added factor of strangers scrutinising your every reaction just because you’re a celeb, but maybe there’s also something to be said for the days of the babymoon, when new mums prioritised languishing at home, getting to know their new bundles instead of dashing off to Starbucks or the Post Office. We’re not saying mums should be housebound – I was out having coffee within 24 hours of having my second baby and felt all the more human for being able to do so – but I sometimes wonder if we’re just way too keen to resume normal life, and too reluctant to slow down long enough to treasure our new life with a newborn. After all, Starbucks will probably always be there. Our babies won’t.
Jill adds, “On the prospect of moving home to Ireland, what I don’t imagine I’ll miss is the lack of parks and museums in Cork. They are two-a-penny here in the Bay Area. It’s just incredible the amount of options we have each morning (when I’m not working).”
in terms of facilities and sunshine, they sacrifice in terms of the family life, craic, and altogether Irishness of life on the Emerald Isle. Maybe we could come to some arrangement with our US counterparts on the sunshine? You send us some of that, and we’ll send you some sunny Irish charm and cheer…