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Baby Names Shape Who Your Child Becomes
What’s in a name? Your child’s future, according to linguists at Northwestern University in Chicago. A large study there has found that baby names affect the child throughout their lives. Factors like income, academic achievement, mental health and overall happiness were all impacted by the names parents gave their babies at birth.
Names to watch out for: “poor-sounding” names, effeminate names on boys, and names that are too unique. Also odd spellings and difficult pronunciations.
Guess I’ll have to throw some money in the kids’ therapy jars for this one.
The research team found that the more “feminine” a boy’s name is, for example naming a boy Ashley or Shannon, the more trouble that kid is likely to get into in school.
Giving a girl a name phonemically boyish, like Morgan, produces the opposite result. Girls with masculine-sounding names tend to focus more on math and science, while girls with very femme names like Elizabeth tend more towards excelling in humanities.
Perhaps most interesting is the news that a “poor” name can doom your child to poverty. Analyzing millions of birth certficates, these researchers found that some names have a phonemic construction that resonates with low-class expectations. In other words, some names sound “poor” and the kids with these names get treated like poor, uneducated troublemakers regardless of their actual background.
Per the Christian Science Monitor:
“Kids who have names [that] from a linguistic perspective are likely to be given by poorly educated parents, those kids ended up being treated differently,” Figlio said. “They do worse in school and are less likely to be recommended for gifted [classes] and more likely to be classified as learning disabled.”
He doesn’t offer any examples of a poverty-stricken name. Your guess is as good as mine. If this is something you’re very concerned about, you can always search the society pages of the New York Times for baby names.
What about giving your kid a very weird name? Kids with unusual names tend to stand out in a crowd, and have parents who raise them to be rugged individuals. They don’t fit in well.
If that’s what I’ve doomed my kids to, I feel just fine about that.
Photo: kattjevervoort
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6 Comments
[...] fellow blogger, Sierra, recently wrote about how your child’s name can help determine their future income, educational achievement, mental health and overall [...]
World Cup Fever Inspires Unusual Baby Names | Strollerderby commented on Jun 18 10 at 12:01 pmbob commented on Jun 17 10 at 10:42 am“Poor” might be a euphemism for black or Hispanic.
Lindsay commented on Jun 17 10 at 12:35 pmBasically, if you give your kid a super goofy name, they will pay for it for the rest of their lives. Wasn’t there an article on Strollerderby a few months ago about how employers are hesitant to hire applicants with weird names? I don’t necessarily think that ethnic names constitute as “weird or “poor”. I think that they are referring to parents who name their children “Rainbow” or “Precious”. I went to school with a girl named “Stardust”, and I know a parent who named their child “Dazzling”.
Em commented on Jun 17 10 at 4:23 pmI don’t remember what book it was (the new Freakanomics perhaps?) that touched on this, suggesting that these effects may have less to do with the name and more to do with the kind of parents that chose that kind of name. The clear example here is that poor parents are more likely to name their child a “poor-sounding” name. That kid will likely still be poor when he grows up, but not because of his name – because of the fact he was raised poor.
Marj commented on Jun 21 10 at 11:53 amAlso any name that can be perceived as misspelled can also be seen as a “poor” name. Madeline or Maddalynne? Serena or Serryeena? Hooked on phonics has so much to answer to.
m commented on Jul 26 11 at 2:55 pmwhat about the name mariana?is it good?what carreer will she possibly have?
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