My husband and I both loved the name Kai for our firstborn, and with its translation to “ocean” in Hawaiian and other languages, it was a perfect fit for our surfing lifestyle.
We thought it was a unique choice – until we started hearing it everywhere we went, especially in Orange County beach towns.
At surf contests up and down the coast, there are plenty of sandy little Kai kids hanging around.
Perhaps if we had held a focus group or hired a consultant, we would have known that the popularity of the name was on the upswing.
Picking a name for a child can be grueling and stressful for parents who are uncertain, have a long list of choices or simply are drawing a blank.
Opinions are offered by just about everyone, and the mere expression on people’s faces – whether it’s a smile or a cringe – when you tell them potential picks can make the whole process weigh heavy.
Some parents are deciding to seek outside help when selecting a baby name. Jennifer Moss, founder and CEO of babynames.com, started her website 20 years ago.
“People just came in droves,” she said.
Users can bounce names around with others outside their family and social and economic groups on the site’s message boards. These days, about 1.5 million people visit her site each month, with 1 million registered users.
Offline, some parents are even opting to hire a naming consultant to help narrow down potential names and generate ideas, said Moss, who was a consultant for about three years but says it was a thankless job.
“What we found was when people hire a baby name consultant, they just want validation for what they’ve chosen, or they have no clue, so anything we’d recommend wasn’t good enough,” she said.
She came to realize that naming is ultimately up to the parents.
There are also a lot of people doing online focus groups, asking for strangers’ opinions on names, or what Moss calls “social naming.”
Moss took it one step further and created a “favorite name list,” which mixes up the parents’ favorite names, then allows the public to vote with “likes” or “dislikes.” They can also create private lists just for friends and family.
About half a million people so far have created lists, with more than 3 million people casting their votes.
Moss says some families are turning to ancestry.com to research their family trees for name ideas.
She’s also seeing a lot of people use surnames as first names – “a great way to celebrate a whole branch of a family tree,” she said.
Her website also gives suggestions for pop culture ties. Love vampires? There’s a list of suggestions based on characters from the movie “Twilight.” But Moss warns that too much information isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“A lot of people find that if they have too much input, it gets confusing,” she said.
If it’s something that you know won’t embarrass the child, then simply don’t tell anyone.
Nobody is going to criticize a name after the baby is born, but keep the child’s sanity in mind, said Moss.
“You have to be careful, because this is a person you’re talking about,” she said. “Make sure it’s not a burden for them. Ask, ‘Can this name grow with the child?’” she said. “It might be cute for a toddler, but can it work in the boardroom as well?”
