{"id":13876,"date":"2018-11-13T11:59:36","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T15:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=13876"},"modified":"2018-11-13T12:02:12","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T16:02:12","slug":"baby-naming-issue-should-we-avoid-giving-siblings-similar-middle-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2018\/11\/13\/baby-naming-issue-should-we-avoid-giving-siblings-similar-middle-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Should We Avoid Giving Siblings Similar Middle Names?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi there! We are expecting a baby boy in April. We\u2019ve decided on the first name Miles, and our last name is Cline with a K. We also have a daughter named Parker. Our struggle is with middle names: our daughter\u2019s middle name is Jane (a middle name she shares with her paternal grandma and great-grandma). Nothing sprang to mind for Miles\u2019 middle name as far as someone we\u2019d want to honor\u2014both of our dads have first and middle names we\u2019d rather not use. Then I remembered my dad is sometimes called by the nickname Jay, which was also his grandpa\u2019s name. Miles Jay Cline has a nice ring to it, I think. But is it too similar to Jane? Does it really matter if siblings have close middle names? And this is me getting ahead of myself, but we plan to have a third, and I can almost guarantee we don\u2019t have another one syllable J- name up our sleeves. Would it be strange to have two kids with similar J middle names and one without?<\/p>\n

Thanks for your help, I absolutely love this blog and promise to send an update!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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My own opinion is that middle name similarity is a non-issue. Middle names are rarely used or even known; and even when they ARE known, similarity doesn’t cause confusion. Think of your friends and extended family: how many of their middle names do you know? and would you care about middle-name compatibility within sibling groups, beyond a fleeting flicker of interest? I’m likely in the very top tier of baby name interest, and I don’t think I can remember any of my cousins’ middle names, let alone whether or not they coordinate; and I hardly know any of my friends’ middle names, let alone their siblings’ middle names.<\/p>\n

I care even less about middle-name similarity when honor names are involved. If I have a grandmother Jean and a grandmother Jane, and I have two daughters and I want to honor a grandmother with each one, I’m not going to balk just because my grandmothers happened to have similar names. I wouldn’t do the same for FIRST names—but for middle names, it doesn’t matter to me at all.<\/p>\n

Thinking ahead to the possible future third child, it continues to seem like a non-issue to me: just as I don’t think it matters if two middle names are similar, I don’t think it matters if a third middle name is different—and particularly when the first two middle names went to one boy and one girl. I feel pretty strongly about sibling-name compatibility for first names (though I make exceptions even there), but for middle names I feel the mental equivalent of a giant shrug.<\/p>\n

I guess I do have SOME preferences for a general sort of middle name compatibility. I do care that all the siblings GET middle names (or all NOT get them, either way). I prefer the middle names to be of similar significance if possible—though some honor names are naturally a more significant honor than others, and everyone runs out of honor names they want to use at some point, so I’m more “everyone gets a good naming story” rather than “everybody gets an equally-ranked honor name.” But in MOST situations it doesn’t matter to me if the middle names match or clash in style or sound. (I added that “MOST” during proofreading, because I remembered a sibling group I know of where the siblings all have extremely unusual and interesting noun middle names; if the parents had done that for three of the four children and NOT done it for the fourth, I would have thought that was strange. I would not feel similarly in the case of your children’s sibling group.)<\/p>\n

If you have a child with the middle name Jane and a child with the middle name Jay, it might be cute to have a a similar middle name for a third child, but I would feel zero pressure to do so if I were you. And in fact, I would advise against it: it feels to me that it would lessen the honor of the honor names to choose a third one-syllable J-name just to match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi there! We are expecting a baby boy in April. We\u2019ve decided on the first name Miles, and our last name is Cline with a K. We also have a daughter named Parker. Our struggle is with middle names: our daughter\u2019s middle name is Jane (a middle name she shares with her paternal grandma and […]<\/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-13876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3BO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13876","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=13876"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13881,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13876\/revisions\/13881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}