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David Bly: Child should come first in the naming game

If you named your daughter Olivia, Emma or Sophia, or your son Liam, Mason or Ethan, you were more or less following the crowd and probably not giving much thought to the effects of the child’s name.
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Olivia, Emma, Sophia, Liam, Mason and Ethan were among the top baby names last year.

VKA-BLY-5181.jpgIf you named your daughter Olivia, Emma or Sophia, or your son Liam, Mason or Ethan, you were more or less following the crowd and probably not giving much thought to the effects of the child’s name.

Those were the top names for babies born in 2013 in B.C., and are among the top names given to Canadian babies in 2014.

And fine names they are, too, unlikely to cause the kids any grief as they grow older, because they will probably be surrounded by plenty of friends and classmates with the same or similar names. There’s a certain safety in numbers.

I had three cousins close to my age who were named David. I was seldom without a classmate named David. As an adult, I worked in a newsroom infested with 13 Davids. For a while, I worked a late shift where a trio of copy editors named David saw the paper put to bed, kept a watch on developing news and checked for errors in the first edition. We called it the Three Dave Night, and when we had a little down time, we would watch a bit of TV — usually David Letterman or Super Dave Osborne.

I guess there can be too much of a good thing.

The other end of the spectrum is a unique name, one so unusual it draws attention to itself. Is that good or bad? It depends on the person who carries the name.

Studies have been done for decades on the effects names have on people. And those studies have concluded … well, almost anything you want them to conclude. An article in Business Insider, for example, says the name you give your child could have a socio-economic impact on his or her life.

Another article also points to psychological implications. “A name can have a profound impact on a child that reverberates well into adulthood, a growing body of research suggests,” writes Jeanna Bryner on the website LiveScience.

She cites a scientist who found that boys given girly names tend to misbehave more than their peers by the time they reach Grade 6, an effect that is enhanced if there’s a girl of the same name in the class. Children with names they don’t like tend to have lower self-esteem. Unusual names or bizarre spellings of familiar names can have a similar effect, as a person is made to feel defensive or self-conscious.

Other researchers caution about confusing cause and effect — it’s the attitude of the parents who choose the name that has more effect on the children than the name itself, they say.

Other attitudes come into play — a Florida study found teachers expected less of students with names reflecting a low socio-economic status, and those students tended to perform more poorly than their peers.

There’s no question names matter to people, and that’s why they change them.

Would prejudices of the time have allowed John Wayne to stride across the screen in the same manly manner if he had kept his birth name of Marion Morrison? Would Lauren Bacall have been as glamourous as Betty Joan Perske?

Would Tony Curtis or Rock Hudson fans have swooned as readily for Bernard Schwartz or Roy Harold Scherer, Jr.? Would Kirk Douglas have rocketed to stardom as Issur Danielovitch Demsky?

In most cases, these celebrities deemed it essential to fit into the mainstream. I’d like to think that today, people tend more to celebrate their ethnic roots than hide from them, although sometimes names are streamlined for easier spelling and pronunciation.

I can sympathize with that approach, but that might not mean much coming from a person whose first and last names total eight letters.

When choosing a name for a child, many factors are considered, but the first consideration should be the good of the child, not the ego of the parents or the grandparents, the current top celebrity or the latest trend.

The most important thing, though, is not what parents name the child, but how the parents parent after the child is named. The child who likes herself will in all probability like her name.

dbly@timescolonist.com