{"id":10185,"date":"2014-07-28T07:01:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T11:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10185"},"modified":"2016-02-29T15:36:16","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T19:36:16","slug":"baby-naming-issue-will-the-name-jillian-sound-like-a-mom-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/07\/28\/baby-naming-issue-will-the-name-jillian-sound-like-a-mom-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Will the Name Jillian Sound Like a Mom Name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle!<\/p>\n

Do you think Jillian will be a mom name if I gave it to a girl in the next few years? I think it’s a beautiful name and my instinct says it’ll stand the test of time and it was never so trendy as to make it sound dated, but what if I’m wrong??<\/p>\n

Thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I like the name Jillian a lot; it was on my baby name list, too. I think one reason it doesn’t feel like a mom name to me is that I don’t know a bunch of people my age with the name—or really anyone with the name. My own name and its variants (Kristen, Kirsten, Kiersten, Krista, Kristine) feel startling to me on a new baby because I have so many peers with those names and have hardly ever heard it on anyone younger. The name Sophie would feel startling to me on someone my own age, because I know of a lot of kids with the name but have hardly ever heard it on anyone older. The name Jillian, I have much less experience with. I know of the actress Gillian Anderson, and I think that’s it. Since she’s the only Gillian\/Jillian who comes to mind, I’m surprised she doesn’t skew the name older for me—but I think it’s like how Drew doesn’t seem like a mom name even now that Drew Barrymore is a mom: the name was so unusual for her age group, it didn’t register in my mind as a very weighty statistic.<\/p>\n

I looked up Gillian and Jillian on the Social Security Administration’s baby name site to get an idea for what they’ve been doing over the years. Gillian first appeared in the Top 1000 in 1968 but stayed quite unusual over the decades: 900s, 800s, 700s, sometimes 600s. It had a brief trip to the 300s from 1997 to 2002 (very likely thanks to The X Files), and then dropped back down; in 2013, it was #835.<\/p>\n

The name Jillian appeared in the Top 1000 in 1976 and had a fast and startling rise: #620 the first year it appeared; #236 the very next year; and #96 by 1982. Anyone looking at that chart might have predicted a new Top 10 name—but it never did get higher than #96. It messed around in the 100-200 range for decades, leaving that range only as recently as 2011, when it dropped to #221. Then it was #286 in 2012, and #341 in 2013.<\/p>\n

That’s a lot of numbers in those two paragraphs. My interpretation of those numbers is that the name did come into our society’s awareness at around Mom Age—but as you observed, it never spiked enough to sound truly Mommish. If I were about to meet a Kristen, I would be pretty confident she’d be right around my age; if I were about to meet a Jillian, I would expect anything from about 10 years older than me all the way down to infancy: not as timeless as, say, Elizabeth, but a nice long range.<\/p>\n

The one thing that makes me feel a little alarmed is the way it is RIGHT NOW dropping, after so many years of steadiness. If it drops into the 300-400 range and stays there, no problem: it’s just a little less popular than it was. If it drops until it goes out of the Top 1000, that’s a different story.<\/p>\n

But it’s not such a BAD story. I know lots of women my age who have names more typical of our moms’ age, and I know plenty of kids my kids’ age who have names more typical of my age. My mom and I both have friends named Judy and Susan. My son Rob and I both have friends named Karen, Amy, and Shannon. Although I am glad to be named Kristen and not a name from my mom’s generation or my kids’ generation, I don’t think it’s at all disastrous when it happens—and it happens commonly enough not to stand out much. I guess I’m a little surprised when I meet someone my age named Patty or Carol, or someone my son’s age named Michelle or Nicole, but I don’t think “Oh, poor dear soul.” People often love names for years before they have a baby to name, or become aware of names only after the names have been popular for quite some time, or like familiar names rather than new ones, or name a baby after a peer. So for many reasons, name overlap between generations is common and not something I think of as a big deal, even though I’d personally prefer to avoid it if it comes down to two names I like equally, and to be aware of the issue ahead of time so I can make a decision that takes it into account.<\/p>\n

One advantage to using a name that might be a mom name is that it’s been around long enough to feel pretty secure about it. We know the name Jillian didn’t spike into the Top 10 and then fall right out again, leaving a poor impression. We know it hasn’t started sounding like any of the negative categories people sometimes put names into (stripper, trashy, etc.). I know I’m not feeling tired of it and ready for something new, as is common to feel about most of the names typical of one’s own generation.<\/p>\n

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve come to a conclusion. That conclusion is that a name doesn’t really sound like a Mom Name or a Grandpa Name unless (1) it was very popular in that generation and only in that generation (as with Judy, Susan, Karen, and Amy), and\/or (2) it represents a sound very popular in that generation (as with -bert and -aden). So for example, a lot of the Kris-\/Chris- names sound like Parent Names now, just as a lot of -bert names sound like Grandparent Names, and just as a lot of the -aden names are going to sound like Parent Names and then Grandparent Names when this current batch of kids grows up. Jillian doesn’t click for me with any of those. It seems to me more like the names Meredith and Claire: good on moms, good on babies.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I think it’s very difficult to hear datedness if one is, shall we say, on the dated side oneself. That is, I know it’s very common for grandparents-to-be to suggest names that are from the era when they were naming their own children. I think the comments section is going to be very helpful on this, especially if we can get an idea of how people of different ages see the name. If people in their late 30s and early 40s (the upper range of Parent Age) are saying Jillian is a great and perfectly usable name, but people in their 20s and early 30s (the lower range of Parent Age) are saying it sounds dated, we’ll know the impression of the name is shifting. Though even in that case I’d still say it wasn’t common enough for this to rule out using it now, as I might say if you were considering the name Kristen: I love the name Kristen, but it’s a Mom Name for current babies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Name update!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hi Swistle!<\/p>\n

A while back, I asked you hypothetically about the name Jillian. Since then, I had a son, Everett, whose name seems to appear often on your site, but we luckily haven’t seen too much around us yet. If Everett had been a girl, we were also thinking about Willow, which I think bears some similarity to the sound of Jillian.<\/p>\n

Thanks!
\nLindsay<\/p>\n

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Hi Swistle! Do you think Jillian will be a mom name if I gave it to a girl in the next few years? I think it’s a beautiful name and my instinct says it’ll stand the test of time and it was never so trendy as to make it sound dated, but what if I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2Eh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10185"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11924,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10185\/revisions\/11924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}