To think it’s very sad certain professions are denied to some children

[continuallychargingmyphone]

I just didn’t know when I joined MN that if your name is not suitably middle class you are forced into a life of servitude in Asda or Tesco. No being a high court judge for you.

Or, aibu to think people are ridiculous and call your baby what you like?

@silverhairedcat wow completly agree. I'm English, with a very non English name, no idea why tbh.
What I do know is, iv been told to my face, that it had been assumed I was a different but certain nationality and thank God I wasn't. My dds last teachers, (She had 2 that covered different days) told me that they had flipped a coin for who would be the one that had to meet me for reception induction as they thought I was a certain nationality. Disgusting. This hasn't been the only time either.

Having foreign names doesn't seem to stop the enormous amount of people.....

You see that's different .... because these names have no association within the U.K. So there aren't any preconceived ideas about their background

These threads turn my stomach

Chuck

Chuck would have been christened Charles no doubt, and Jeffrey and Timothy and Robert etc are making the point you are criticising?

I gave my daughter an old family name, of ashkenazi origin (Raya).
Everyone assumes (before actually meeting her) that she must be Pakistani or Indian.

y dds last teachers, (She had 2 that covered different days) told me that they had flipped a coin for who would be the one that had to meet me for reception induction as they thought I was a certain nationality. Disgusting. This hasn't been the only time either.
That's appalling, I can't believe they admitted that

The country is short of doctors and they are being actively recruited from abroad. There have also been quite a lot of people from immigrant backgrounds in the medical profession for decades. Ambitious immigrant parents want their kids to go into medicine because they feel it's more meritocratic and less based on old-boy networks than law or City finance. (As I was recently reminded by a friend whose parents kept trying to make her go into medicine.) Foreign names, especially from the Indian subcontinent, are accepted more there than in some other professions. And by now there are quite a lot of children of doctors with foreign names becoming doctors themselves.

Tatler's somewhat surprising list of 'the poshest baby names of all time': www.tatler.com/article/poshest-baby-names-of-all-time

I wonder if they are secretly trolling, and imagining some easily influenced social climbing young parents calling their kids Tracy and Youngblood after seeing it.

My grandmother was a scullery maid called Florence in the 1930s. She was told her name was too pretty, and had to go by her middle name of Mary instead. I like to think we've moved on a little since then.

“user1499173618

When I was at prep school in the 1970s a Daniel joined the school and my parents had an attack of the vapours...”

God your parents sound awful.

TBH my mum worked for SS for 40 years and there were undoubtedly “register” names but they were far more outlandish than the oft trotted out Chardonnay. It’s complex but the parents lives were complex and obviously the children In question were seriously disadvantaged long before they started sending out cvs.

I find the desperately “try hard” names like Persephone and hermoine as bad

No, not awful! They just lived in a bubble where absolutely no one was called Daniel. This is a long time ago!

Some of the names on this thread that people judge are actually really traditional in other countries.

Would people really judge a French woman called Chantal, or a Scandinavian man called Kai? How about a Spanish woman called Mercedes?

Daniel Day-Lewis, son of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, is now 61. Daniel Massey, son of the actor Raymond Massey, born in 1933. Dan Cruikshank, architectural historian, noticeably posh, now 68. And so on. Your parents were indeed in a bubble, user! I've always thought of Daniel as a classless name, as most biblical and royal names are.

I hate to admit it but in general someone raised in a traditionally middle class family do tend to try and promote work ethics and academia a lot because often that's how they were successful.

So when Edmund is more socially refined it's not because he's called Edmund it's because the name Edmund may be very popular in higher earning families.

I do think though if you do have a polite but confident air your name has only a minimal effect. Akin to having tattoos - some jobs it won't be a problem with but others it may be.

• Ryvita wouldn't be at any disadvantage in Admin, working in Tesco or as a swimming instructor. She may however, struggle as a CEO or a Doctor.

In the very unlikely eventuality of a kid being named Ryvita, I don't think it would hold her back from getting into medicine. All medical schools and all NHS appointments are subject to really stringent recruitment procedures and equal opps are a big deal. If she had the qualifications and the experience, she'd be highly likely to get an interview and then it would be up to her.

In the very unlikely eventuality of a kid being named Ryvita, I don't think it would hold her back from getting into medicine. All medical schools and all NHS appointments are subject to really stringent recruitment procedures and equal opps are a big deal. If she had the qualifications and the experience, she'd be highly likely to get an interview and then it would be up to her

The point being that Ryvita is very unlikely to get the qualifications or experience. It's not her name that will hold her back, its the fact that she had parents who called her Ryvita in the first place.

Can you all please stop dissing the name Ryvita? It's on my shortlist Along with Marmite.

Life's too short and busy for me to read 10 pages so excuse this if someone has alreayd posted...

but an adult can change their name.

One of my siblings got to around 30 and decided their name gave off certain associations so asked everyone to call them by their middle name rather than their first name.

Now that 20 years have gone, no one knows they used to be referred to by a different name.

But you can change your first name and surname at any time.

The hippy dippy batshit urban trustifarians children seem to do ok. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter for them because Theyll always be rich privileged (rich and privileged enough not to have to worry about daft things like a child called Daniel tuning up to bedales to join their children)

They are the people who it doesn;t matter what they are called, they are already rich and privileged anyway.
As said, its not about the names, its about what the names say about the people.

There will always be the children of rich, well connected weirdos who can call their kids whatever they like.

Heartsy Tinkerbell, Moonzapper Case, etc.

Parents will probably give them a 'normal sounding' nickname and buy their children's way into academia or work.

How rich the parents are does matter.

Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible that children with those names actually do tend to be naughty. You can't possibly say in which direction the causation is working should there be one.

No, which is why I said ‘may’ rather than an absolute.

However you do need to look at what’s likely, based on the other evidence we know about unconscious bias, confirmation bias and other aspects of human psychology.

Is it likely that a certain combination of letters leads to a naughty child, or a bright one? We can probably cross that one off the list.

Is it likely that perceptions behaviour and intellect are associated (rightly or wrongly) to class and ethnicity, and therefore names associated with certain subsets of social class and with certain ethnicities are assumed to take on those characteristics.

Is it likely that at least some teachers, who are fallible humans with the same tendency to bias as the rest of us will, having decided that Elizabeths are bright and Chelseas are naughty, that Williams go to university and Callums go to detention, will unconsciously treat children with those names differently?

It would be amazing should teachers behave entirely differently from recruiters for jobs, where a clear and active bias has been repeatedly found based solely on names.

Making assumptions is not always unfair and mean/nasty/etc. Because the thing is, when someone looks at a name of the type being talked about here, and thinks "bet they didn't go to Oxford/are highly educated/come from money/whatever", the chances very much are they are correct. And actually, therein lies the real problem that we should care about.

I’m struggling to see a positive element of someone making an assumption (rather than seeking objective evidence) about an individual based on their name in the contexts discussed on this thread, whether it’s about their education, their skills, their intellect, their ambition, or their suitability to do a certain job.

Because it is a problem when someone thinks ‘bet they didn’t go to Oxford’ based on a person’s name. It’s part of a wider problem but is in itself a barrier to social mobility.

Chuck would have been christened Charles?

These days, probably not. I do not understand the trend for giving children names that used to be nicknames.

Maisie, Molly - nicknames for Mary
Jack - nickname for John
Peggy, Maggie, Daisy, Meg - nicknames for Margaret.
Katie, Kathy - nicknames for Katherine/Kathleen
Lizzy, Beth, - nicknames for Elizabeth.

Why not give the proper name, use the nickname, and allow the person to choose which to use as an adult?

Just pick a name that your child will like, not one that appeals to your vanity about your own creativity. One that uses the common spelling, is easy to pronounce and suits an adult as well as a child. Don't pick a name to "match" a sibling. Again, that is about parental vanity - it shouldn't be about you, it should be about the person who has to live with the name.

In general, I notice the "unique" thing does not seem to matter to middle class and above. They seem to be aware already that every child is unique, and the name makes them no more or less unique.

I think my name dates me to within 5 years each way. I never met one child with this name in 30 years of teaching.

Molly - nickname for Monica