Adventures in Toddling

When selecting a name for their child, most people try to select a name that is not currently popular. After all, who wants their kid to be one of 12 Emmas in their class? Many parents choose a name they think is rare only to end up in a wave of that name. It’s nobody’s fault, really; it’s not as if one child gets named Zachary and all of that family’s friends and relatives rush out to change their own kids’ names.

My best guess as to how it works is this: a couple looks for a unique name for their baby and chooses Aiden. They tell their friends and family about the baby, generating a little bit of chatter. Other people overhear this chatter (for example, a conversation in the mall about the baby or a grandmother telling all of her friends about it) and decide they like that name. It gets passed on to people looking for baby names who like it and use it. As more children are given the name, more chatter containing the name is generated and the name spreads. Since most of the people with that name are babies, parents choosing the name have never met anyone with the name and don’t realize that it’s so popular. The result is a bunch of parents getting hooked on a name at around the same time with no way to know until they arrive at playgroup to find that all of the other boys are named Aiden and the girls are all Emma.

If a child does have a very popular name, it is almost never approrpriate to tell their parents that their child’s name is ’so popular these days.’ Chances are that they are already acutely aware of this and don’t really want to be reminded, much like you wouldn’t tell someone with a Kanji tattoo that everyone is getting ‘Harmony’ written in Japanese-looking giberish on their arms.

Actually, until someone said this to me (that Julia was becoming a popular name, not that my Kanji tat sucked), I wasn’t aware that Julia was popular at all. I just looked it up on the Social Security Administration website and it turns out that Julia has been in the top 35 baby names for the last decade. Oops.