Many parents Google baby names before naming their children. In the past, this was done to perhaps determine what a particular name meant or its historical origins. But in what seems to be an advancement in that practice, parents today of yet-to-be-born children are Googleing baby names, but get this, to manage their baby’s virtual identity even before they are born.
Have a you ever gone onto a site and typed in your “unique” name as a user name only for the site to tell you there is already another user with that name?
“I did not want them to have names where there were 15 in their class like I was,” Ms. Goldstein said. “There were a lot of Debbies back then” – Parent interviewed via nytimes
I don’t know about you but I find it at the very least a put off. On other worse case scenarios, someone types in your name looking for your contacts or your Facebook or Twitter profiles and they find tens if not hundreds of profiles with similar names, all on different social media sites. But the worst case scenario has to do with embarrassing coincidences such as having a name similar to that of a porn star or a known felon.
Some of these things sound familiar and even amusing but for many new parents, this is more of a challenge than something to laugh about. In a day and age when everyone wants to stand out, we are about to see an era of baby name search engine optimization. Because most parents want their children to stand out when they come of age, many are busy looking for unique names that when keyed into a search engine will yield very few results.
According to some of these parents, this is similar to taking one’s child to an Ivy League school where their credentials are easily recognizable in a sea of possible credentials. Search Engine Optimization creates a virtual value system where content is categorized and whose relevance is closely tied in with the predefined rating system.
But in some instances, giving your child an ultra unique name may not be the best thing because in the event that they were involved in a scandal or required a certain level of anonymity for one reason or another, they would be stuck with an online identity that was difficult to hide or obscure. Other tools that are coming up to help parents decide what to name their children include apps that choose between two names for you, name rating apps that analyze names based on location, demographics and so on.
It’s however, amusing to find that for many parents, naming a first child seems like an adventure but with subsequent children, the need to name them after ones personal likings over-rides any previous leanings towards other more-sophisticated methods of naming children. Ergo, a parent who named their first child Asher owing to the uniqueness may name their second or third child Tom or James simply out of a fancy towards the name.
