{"id":14101,"date":"2019-04-02T08:50:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T12:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=14101"},"modified":"2019-04-02T13:40:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T17:40:01","slug":"baby-naming-issue-should-they-change-the-name-and-if-so-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2019\/04\/02\/baby-naming-issue-should-they-change-the-name-and-if-so-how\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Should They Change the Name? and If So, How?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,<\/p>\n

I am writing you regarding my 16 months old little boy’s name. I come from another country and together with my husband, we chose a name coming from that country.<\/p>\n

I have felt quite a bit of regret about the name since he was about 4 months old, as I had assumed that it would be easier for people to pronounce and deal with a silent letter. Life happened and we did not change the name, and while I thought about using his middle name instead, it would not have solved the problem as it is also a foreign name (Yes, he has two foreign names. I blame pregnancy hormones, and my husband was not particularly bothered by the idea I guess). Anyway, I now worry that my child is going to struggle with his name.<\/p>\n

It is too late to change his name at this point, but I have been thinking about two possibilities that involve adding a more common name (either middle or first):
\n– Either adding a second middle name to my child’s name, in the event that he prefers later to have a name that is easier to deal with daily,
\n– Or adding it as a first name, and moving his current first name in the middle spot. If he wants to keep using his foreign name, he will have to specify it. That does not sounds quite fair though and I am not sure my husband will be on board.
\nWhich option do you think is best?<\/p>\n

We are thinking of:
\n– Noah, which is pretty common for his birth year, but not so much in his state,
\n– Hugo, which is keeping a euro-style but might be too rare,
\n– Elliott.<\/p>\n

Either way, if he prefers to change his name, I think using a middle name would be easier on him than figuring out a new name which is why I want to add one now.<\/p>\n

I want to let him know at some point that it is totally ok if he wants to change his name, but I am not sure at what age it is appropriate to do so? I imagine that as he grows and possibly ask questions about this we will figure it out, but I wonder if you or your readers have any advice about how to go about it?<\/p>\n

I have discovered your blog after I named my baby (wish I discovered it before) and I like your and your readers’ approach to naming so I hope I am not sounding too crazy and you have an opinion about this.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hm. I am not sure what I think. My first thought was that it seemed simplest and best to add another middle name, and that you should pick whichever one you liked best: sort of a do-over of the naming process, but this time for a potential future back-up name. Easiest to do, easiest to explain (you wouldn’t even have to tell most people you’d done it), and covers the just-in-case without making a dramatic and potentially unnecessary change. I went to school with a kid who had a difficult and unusual first name, and he Made It His in a way that made him much cooler to the rest of us. Teachers struggled with it on the first day of class, but all the kids knew it from years of being in school with him. But kids have different temperaments, and one kid’s Rocking It is another kid’s Self-Conscious, so having a middle name he can fall back on seems nice.<\/p>\n

My second thought was that you wouldn’t even necessarily need to do a legal name change to have another name he can go by. I went to school with a Gary who went by Jay: it wasn’t part of his name, he just…went by Jay. On the first day of class, we were all reminded that his name was actually Gary, but the rest of the year he was just Jay to everybody. Your son could choose his own name, or you could right now start using another name as a nickname, without doing anything formal.<\/p>\n

My third thought was about possible future siblings. What you do with your son’s name now may affect what you want to do with his siblings’ names, if he will have siblings. It doesn’t HAVE to affect it: many people use a different style of name for a firstborn, sometimes because of honor names, or sometimes because their style changes after they have a real-life baby in their lives. Still, this is something I’d want to think out ahead of time. For future children (if you’re planning any), do you think you will make different style choices with their names? And would you prefer their names to coordinate with your son’s, or is it fine if they’re different? This may influence whether you’d prefer to go with FirstName NewMiddle Middle or NewFirst Firstname Middle.<\/p>\n

My fourth thought was a favorable feeling toward changing the legal first name while continuing to call him the name you’ve been calling him. This would be the highest level of hassle: his name would need to be changed at the doctor’s office, on insurance forms, on his Social Security card—everything. And then after that it would be a regular small hassle: remembering to say his legal first name when you arrived at a doctor appointment, explaining to the preschool that he goes by his middle name, calling the health insurance company once again to explain that the referral was accidentally written with your son’s middle name, etc. But many, many kids go by their middle names, and it seems like the kind of minor hassle that becomes routine with time. Overall, though, I keep balking at this plan, mostly because I remember approximately how tired I was with a 16-month-old child, and the thought of handling court and documents and Social Security at a time like that makes me feel retroactively overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

My fifth thought is maybe he could go use his first and middle initials as a nickname.<\/p>\n

My sixth thought is to wonder whether we could just let this whole thing work itself out. Right now you’re in a stage of life where your baby is meeting a whole lot of people for the first time, so his unusual name is an issue again and again. But pretty soon he’ll be encountering the same people again and again: the same teacher, the same classmates, the same pediatrician. Maybe then it’ll be only an occasional issue, and will seem less in need of a solution. And as the child gets older, you’ll start to get an idea of what HE thinks of it: maybe he’ll complain about his name, or maybe he’ll love it, or maybe a nickname will evolve on its own. If he complains, you have some solutions all set to go, and he can pick what he likes best; if he loves his name, and\/or a nickname chooses itself, you won’t have gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.<\/p>\n

As to the question about when to introduce the concept of a name change to him, I’d let that happen naturally too. One of my kids had the opposite issue: a name much more common in our state than nationwide, so that there were three boys with his name in his preschool class. All three boys went by the name plus a surname initial; in my son’s case, saying those together fast sounded similar to another name, so that sometimes someone would think that other name was his name. At some point, maybe the next year during enrollment when I was filling out the “prefers to be called” part of the registration form, I asked him casually if he’d prefer to be known by that other name, and he said no, he thought it was fun to belong to “the club” of people with his same name. He was about four or five years old then, and was able to consider the topic. My point is that I don’t think you’ll need to pick a time to tell him it’s fine if he wants to change his name; I think it’ll come up naturally, and that he’ll know how you feel about it by how you talk about his name in general and how you respond to the things he says about his name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle, I am writing you regarding my 16 months old little boy’s name. I come from another country and together with my husband, we chose a name coming from that country. I have felt quite a bit of regret about the name since he was about 4 months old, as I had assumed that […]<\/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-14101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3Fr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14101","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=14101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14106,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14101\/revisions\/14106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}