Ask your closest school teacher or pediatrician about the names given to kids by their parents, and you’ll cringe with secondhand embarrassment. Or, at least, I confess that I cringe. For the past two decades, trends in baby names have coalesced around the desire to be unique. In the age of authenticity, parents are searching for one-of-a-kind names, or new spellings of popular names, to set their kids apart from their neighbors and peers. The people who will be changing my adult diapers in my nursing home, prescribing my heart health medication in my geriatric years, and teaching my grandchildren in school are going to have some very odd names, or familiar names with odd spellings, and I am doing my best to come to peace with that now.
You’ve likely noticed the same trend. In my orbit, for example, the new trends in baby names fall into three categories: the boys whose names end in “ayden” (Brayden, Hayden, Kayden, Jayden), the girls whose names include “leigh” (Brynleigh, Ashleigh, Leighanne, Kinsleigh) or names that are also names of other things (River, Freedom, Topaz, King, Peak, etc). It’s not just that these names are “new” in the span of history, or that families are searching for unique non-traditional names. In a desire to set their child up with a stand-out name, everyone ends up landing on the exact same set of stand-out names and naming conventions.
In the Washington Post, Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Van Dam do a deep dive into baby name data to see what trends they could find. Their findings lend credence to the observation that parents want unique and different baby names, but they all end up selecting the same sets of baby names anyway. The reporters use the phrase “lockstep individualism” to describe their findings.
Margot Melcon, a playwright based in San Francisco, offers a case study. When Melcon, 38, was pregnant, she and her husband, John, wanted their son’s name to stand out. “We wanted him to be cool,” she laughed on a recent Zoom call. “So how are we going to make our kid sound cool?” […]
With Melcon’s hospital discharge fast approaching, they had three hours to make a decision. Ultimately, they found inspiration in Jon’s family’s Bible — an appeal to tradition that Wattenberg said is not uncommon these days.
Inside the cover, the couple found a list of family members who had passed the book down from generation to generation. One name stood out, Melcon said: Cyril. Cyril was distinctive, she said, but it didn’t quite fit their boy, either. So they tweaked Cyril just a bit to produce Cyrus. “Cyrus feels very lovely if he’s a poet or a painter,” she said, moving her hands like a conductor or someone pantomiming a swimming squid. “And it would suit him if he was a jock: ‘Cy, pass me the ball!’”
Nothing about Melcon’s experience suggests an effort to follow the herd: The desperate deadline, the mad dash for the family Bible, the search for and subsequent discovery of a name that feels uniquely perfect for a tiny new unique human. But when I showed Melcon the data, her “lockstep individualism” was right there in black and white. It turns out that Cyril and other “-il” names peaked in the early 1900s; Jon’s ancestor was born in 1887. And “-us” names in boys crested in the 2010s. Little Cyrus was born in 2015.
The irony has been confirmed by the data in the article: Many people are conforming to the baby name trend with the desire to name their child something special. This is especially true of baby name endings — the researchers are now saying that 50% of babies are named after a trendy ending, making the supposed diversity of names a myth. We are not so unique as we like to think.
It might seem like fair game to ridicule a celebrity like Elon Musk for naming two of his kids X Æ A-12 and Exa Dark Sideræl, but what about everyone else with innovative names? As fun as it might be to poke at my fellow millennials and their penchant for cringe, the self-righteousness smugness only gets one so far. Parenting choices are always subject to host of judgments and compassion seems in short supply.
While it is surely ironic how baby name innovations all seem to follow the same patterns, this also suggests that parents, precisely in their desire to be unique, are all being pushed by broader cultural forces beyond their rational control. They are, in order words, not as free as they believe themselves to be.
If we believe people have free will, that people are rational creatures capable of making good and proper choices all the time, then we will grow resentful of people when they fail to meet our standards. The alternative belief is the bound will, in which human decision-making is influenced and controlled by a whole host of illogical, irrational, and ununderstood forces. If people’s wills are bound, then we are more likely to be compassionate when they suffer and struggle. It is the difference between pronouncing the doom of a prophet, who declares “they should know better,” and the mercy of Jesus, who declares “they are like sheep without a shepherd.”
In the case of baby names, if we believe in free will, we will bemoan the state of baby names as a cultural “tragedeigh.” We’ll snap to judgment when the person at the checkout counter at the grocery store has a pop culture name like Maverick or Khaleesi or Katniss, or when our kids get an invitation to play at “Kayleighann’s” house. We might even snicker, as I confess I do, and silently whisper to Jayden/Hayden/Kayden that their parents should have tried harder. We’ll wonder why there isn’t legislation to stop such nonsense. We’ll judge the parents who named the child, judgment that will inevitably fall on the whole family, including the child who had no control over the matter. Such a perspective makes us (especially moi) more of a jerk than anything, a jerk-ness rooted in our belief in free will and rational thought. Better choices should have been made.
Instead, we might imagine that behind an unusual name there stands parents trying to fulfill an unattainable law: Thou shalt fit in by standing out. Parents who are perhaps weighed down with the burden and expectation to succeed in life. It’s not a pity so much as a sign of the times, of the many ways we all navigate the often competing pressures of modern life. Because every parent carries some version of that burden in their own spirit, even if it doesn’t show in the way they name their kid.
The expectations that we all conform to social pressure while simultaneously standing out from the crowd is a needle that can’t be threaded. Like sheep without a shepherd, modern families will struggle until that impossible demand is lifted, not when it is magically fulfilled. It’s a game that can’t be won, a paradox of priorities and values. The only antidote is a word of grace, one that absolves us both of the need to be special and the need to fit in.
Until then, people will continue to try and meet the world’s impossible demands. They’ll strive for creative uniqueness and join the trendsetters in lockstep individuality. They’ll do their best to stand out in a world that demands we keep trying to stand out. They’ll continue to perform for the world’s demands, until perhaps someone reminds them that their name, regardless of its uniqueness, is known by Jesus and written in the book of life.
This was fascinating, thanks for a thoughtful reflection.