Jayden

Wow, this thread has gone off at a tangent! Don't know if OP has / will come back / read this but on the off-chance:

I love Joseph!

Not keen on Jayden though love Aidan or Hayden.

Don't like alliteration either so would rule out Jayden Joseph & JJ.

My vote is for Aidan Joseph

*I don't understand why it's so difficult to understand that the 'real world' is full of prejudice.

Yes it is wrong, but stamping your foot and shooting the messenger won't fix it.*

The "real world is full of prejudice, racism, sexism

I always thought it was a good thing to challenge discrimination in any form and not just accept that is how it is.

I also think that perpetuating the "fact" that having a certain name holds you back in life is quite absurd.
And I don't like the idea of having to name children according to which "class" they are, or which class their parents aspire to be is ludicrous

I dont think that sends a good message to anyone- quick, pretend you are MC so you are successful.

Aren't we supposed to teach our children that the world is at their feet and if they work hard and have a good work ethic and ambition then they can achieve great things?

I was given an article by a friend when pregnant that said you should imagine your child's name being read out at a Bank of England Monetary Policy Meeting and wonder if eyebrows would be raised. If this sounds like a load of pretentious middle class BS to you, by all means call him Jayden.

Then I wouldn't want my children to work for an employer who was that much of a twat.

Personally I don't think it's up to me who my child works for.

I am aware of that usual. I have seen just how 'up' your back has been for a number of pages now.

I am only sorry it has lead you to accuse me of all sorts of appalling things and encouraged a lot of others to jump on what I think was a really unfair bandwagon.

I am very sorry you feel slighted by me. I would be a fucking idiot to look down on the WC given that I am but one generation and one university degree removed from the WC. I and my parents benefitted from a degree of social mobility that now seems denied to my daughter's generation and I think this is a wicked shame and waste of people's lives and talents.

Because sadly there will be many people who want to put others in a box and keep them there.

I would hazard a guess, Tantrums, that the answer is that the overwhelming majority of children with names like Jaydn/Jayden/Jaydon/Kayden/Tyler are from a particular socio-economic class. It's not 'several' children. It's most children with these names.

Similarly, I would suggest that most children called Sebastian/Rupert/Jago/Ottilie/Henrietta are from a wholly different socio-economic class.

Of course, someone named Sebastian can become a drug dealer. In the same way that someone named Tyler can become a Law Lord. But if outcomes in life are linked to class background (likelihood of gaining certain qualifications, likelihood of going to university, likelihood of going to a Red Brick university, likelihood of earning over a certain salary, likely age of child-bearing etc) then names used by certain classes will inextricably be linked to certain class outcomes.

Of course the OP may not give a flying fuck about any of that. However, she asked for opinions. Which people have given.

Here is what I said, what seems like so many years ago now.

Please do note the inverted commas, a lot of people seemed to miss those.

*The 'problem' with Jayden is that it will immediately mark him out as 'not middle class'.

You may not see this as a problem at all, in which case go for it.

But I do think names are important so I would try to give any child a pretty neutral sounding name that wouldn't allow others immediately to put him in a particular box.

I think 'joseph' ticks all the boxes - its classic, its classless, you can shorten it to a variety of other nicknames if 'joseph' all the time is too heavy or formal.*

So the answer to that is to advise anyone who likes the name to avoid it?

No. I refer you to the very first response I posted to this op.

All I have ever advised is for people to think and be aware of the choices they make because names have power and your child will probably carry it for the rest of his or her life.

I don't understand why it's so difficult to understand that the 'real world' is full of prejudice.

Yes it is wrong, but stamping your foot and shooting the messenger won't fix it.

Pragmatic - well, that's what I thought about 10 pages ago.

But now I find its all sorts of snobbery, classism, naivety or stupidity.

You live and learn.

Ok spero

People are twats and judge people based on one experience with the name.

So the answer to that is to advise anyone who likes the name to avoid it?

Fair enough. I give up.

But why make your child's life harder than it needs to be if you have a choice between two names and one has less baggage?

This.

It is just pragmatism.

Anyone discounting a CV for example because the name is seen as WC needs to find a new job.

I agree entirely. But there are some people out there like that - my first pupil master boasted about throwing any CV that wasn't Oxford or Cambridge in the bin, to give an extreme example.

But usual they won't find a new job. There are literally tens of thousands of people with that kind of prejudice in jobs with hiring responsibility. They aren't going anywhere. There is no way of weeding them out.

Not that it is seen "as WC". Just that it doesn't get chosen as often by employers.

Im asking why knowing several children in a class with this name means that all Jaydons are judged in the same way?

And here we have the problem with this thread in a nutshell. You are obviously an intelligent woman. You can at least operate a computer.

Read through what you have said again.

All that I and others have been saying is that some names have connotations. Some people will judge. Some people are twats. But why make your child's life harder than it needs to be if you have a choice between two names and one has less baggage?

im not "on a roll" Spero

Im asking why knowing several children in a class with this name means that all Jaydons are judged in the same way?

I wonder why there is a problem with choosing a name that you like, because somehow it has been deemed that all XYZ names are bad because they appear WC

I wonder why a dc named Tyler cannot become a high court judge

I wonder why seemingly intelligent people are happy to perpetuate this stereotype and warn people that their child will be judged as somehow inferior because they have a name that is WC or Chavvy or naughty or the name of a child of a drug addict?

It never fails to amaze me how people cannot just look at the child and make a judgement. Rather than assuming all sorts about the parents, the family, their employment history, their financial status.

Don't stop Tantrums she is clearly on a roll.

I can play too. I know several Sophies. One has a pony but the other one looks like trouble. I don't know how I am going to contain the cognitive dissonance.

I love how people are being deliberately obtuse on this thread. If you can't accept that certain names have certain socio-economic associations, regardless of whether such associations are unfair, misguided, pointless or a bastion of an unfair class system, then you live in a different world to me.

Spero has pointed out cold, hard facts. Not judgments. Facts. You may not like it, you may wish to change the status quo. But don't shoot the messenger.

Tantrums names don't get reputations based on someone 'picking' a stereotype for each name out of a choice of two convenietly different children. Come off it.

I dont' really understand this level of fuss and nastiness.

It seems to me that some of the people being attacked have simply pointed out a fact which is proven by this thread's very length and content: Jayden has become almost a parody of a name, with very definite connotations.

Just this name. Goodness knows why, but it is. That's a world away from having some sort of sliding scale where all names are judged on their 'class'. The point of what some people are trying to say on this thread is that it's just Jayden. And that's a valid point to make to OP.

You could look at it another way and say that the perfectly nice name of Jayden (and it is a perfectly nice sounding word) has been ruined by a combination of the weird class obsession in this country combined with culture's love of creating a shorthand.