{"id":13411,"date":"2018-05-25T10:43:13","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T14:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=13411"},"modified":"2018-05-25T10:43:13","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T14:43:13","slug":"baby-naming-issue-swapping-the-parents-surnames-for-boys-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2018\/05\/25\/baby-naming-issue-swapping-the-parents-surnames-for-boys-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Swapping the Parents’ Surnames for Boys\/Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Swistle!<\/p>\n

I need help with a verdict. I\u2019m due in July with a girl, whose name will be Willa Rose. We have two boys, James Francis and Christopher Aaron. My question is about last names\u2014both boys have my last name as a second middle name (Phel@n) and my husband\u2019s last name (sounds like K@minsky). We\u2019re going to give our daughter my last name as her last name\u2014Phel@n. I also want to give her a second middle name of K@minsky, but my husband doesn\u2019t want to. His reasons are: it\u2019s clunky and annoying (it is, somewhat, for example, our first son\u2019s second middle name was left off of his SS card, and it\u2019s often included on documents as a last name along with his real last name\u2014he\u2019s only 2 and his paperwork has been pretty limited, so I\u2019m not sure what fun it will cause going into school years), and his other reason is that he doesn\u2019t \u201cneed\u201d it. I want to include it so that there\u2019s still some symmetry with our kids\u2019 names matching one another, even though their last names will be different, and I like the idea of including her heritage from both sides in her name. Part of me is still hesitant to go in such a bold direction by giving her a different last name than her brothers, but I\u2019ve been slowly convinced over my pregnancy. My husband originally suggested the idea and I dismissed it because I wanted the kids to be \u201ctogether,\u201d but then I realized that I\u2019m \u201cout\u201d of the group by not having the same last name as the rest of the family, and your recent post about last names helped to convince me, too. Anyway, what\u2019s your verdict\u2014include my husband\u2019s last name as a second middle name, or no?<\/p>\n

Also, unrelated, but while I have you, do you think our boys names are too common for the relatively uncommon girls name, Willa? All names are from authors (M.R. James, Christopher Marlowe, and Willa Cather\u2014with a little nod to William Shakespeare), and they also tie to important people in our lives. Willa Rose uses both my husband\u2019s and my own middle name, too. Margaret (Atwood) was another frontrunner we were considering, and our boy name was Theodore Michael (Fyodor Dostoevsky). We\u2019ll probably have one more baby, so those are contenders for #4. Do you think all of those work stylistically?<\/p>\n

Thanks!<\/p>\n

Katie<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I absolutely vote for giving her your husband’s surname as her second middle name. I feel quite strongly about it. It follows the pattern of the first two kids, and makes the whole arrangement easy to understand and explain. Leaving his name out is non-parallel and makes everything seem kind of weird and hard to remember. Symbolically-speaking, he could also seem to be saying it doesn’t matter that your surname is in the boys’ names (since he considers that an unimportant role for himself to have in his daughter’s name), or that it’s not as important that a girl have all the family surnames. I get what he’s saying when he says he doesn’t need it, but what you guys are doing with the names is pretty cool and symbolic, so I say let’s not mess up the symbolism. I would like to avoid any possibility of the message that it didn’t matter to her father if she had his surname in her name or not, but that it DID matter to him that her brothers had it.<\/p>\n

But mostly it’s the symmetry of it: it just makes sense that way, and it doesn’t make sense not to. Sure, it can be a little clunky or annoying, but you’ve already done it for the first two kids, so I’d keep going with it. Let all the kids bond over the clunkiness and annoyingness. And in my experience with five children who have my surname as their second middle name, it’s not that big of a deal in the long run. Most of the fuss (or potential for fuss) happens while getting the Original Paperwork (birth certificate, Social Security card, doctor’s office registration, school registration) in place, and after that you mostly coast. (Plus, you get good at drawing little diagrams on new paperwork with brackets and labels to show which names are in which role.)<\/p>\n

I don’t think Willa is too unusual with James and Christopher. I usually think it’s fine to have different levels of popularity with the girl names in the family than with the boy names, though I personally prefer to aim for roughly-similar levels within a brother group or within a sister group. I think Margaret and Theodore are both good as future siblings. Margaret is more common than Willa (in 2017, Margaret was #132 and Willa was #454), but they feel within range to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Swistle! I need help with a verdict. I\u2019m due in July with a girl, whose name will be Willa Rose. We have two boys, James Francis and Christopher Aaron. My question is about last names\u2014both boys have my last name as a second middle name (Phel@n) and my husband\u2019s last name (sounds like K@minsky). We\u2019re […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3uj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13411","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=13411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13412,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13411\/revisions\/13412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}