Older MNers who had kids in the 80s/90s

[PortSalutPlease]

Why the fuck did we all get the middle name Louise?! Have just left a hen do, and of the 12 women there, 9 of us. NINE. Was there some kind of 80s rule about it?

So funny OP! My 45 year old SiL has the middle name Louise, and 2 of my friends born in the late 80s do too. 😂

Mea culpa, although dd was born in he 90s. Its my dsis's name, though she was a bit underwhelmed by the "honour" as she later said she never liked it.

I was born in 1979. In my primary school there were only 3 girls who did not have the middle name Louise. Me and two girls whose first names were Louise.

I felt very left out!

That is in my primary school class. I don’t know the middle name of all girls in the whole school!

Slightly off topic, when I was a kid in the 60s we had one Louise in our primary school in South London and her name was considered unusual. Go figure.

Haha very funny! Amanda is my middle name - I’d wager some of the other 3 had that??

Our niece, born in 1993, has Louise as a middle name. Her name was changed at the last minute due to a tragic news story at the time and Louise was a name that went well with the replacement first name.
My DC's are boys, but Louise was not even on our long list, let alone shortlist! However, I did notice that almost every other boy around the same age had either Luke, Thomas or a combination of both as their names. Again, we didn't use either.

My daughter (35) has no middle name, I would like her to add my mum's beautiful name as her middle one now she's an adult but it's not worth the hassle.
I don't know anyone with Louise as a middle name, but one girl in my junior school in the 60sl/70s had that as her first name.
My first name is unusual, middle name is rare (one other person with it in the UK going back to1970)

Throwing in Marie too.

I work in a job that involves typing people's full name into a legal document I always have a little game in my own head every time I get a Lisa for example and known it'll be Jane or Claire and it'll be Marie. Etc.

Guilty! My 91 born DD has Louise as her middle name- sorry!

I'm from a little before that age, and Elizabeth seemed to be the universal middle name.
I wonder though if it was something to do with the silver jubilee.

Guilty too! It was a nice name that went well with the first name.

It seemed like half the girls in my early to mid 80s primary school class were called Claire or Catherine, with Emma as a close third. Boys were Matthew, Paul and David. DS1 was born in the late 90s and I can't really remember what was fashionable. It was all "old man" names by the time my younger two arrived.

I'm seriously old, 1948, and in Primary school two of us has exactly the same name, Christian and surname, neither of us had a middle name so I went through Primary school as Name Name 2, I was so glad she didn't get to the grammar school with me for it to continue. (Just proof read and changed 1048 to 1948, I'm not that old!)

I was born in the 50s and my middle name is Anne and my dd was born 1989 her middle name is Louise. I think because my fil was Lewis and dh wanted something near to that. Hadn't realised it was that common.

I always wanted a middle name. My late MIL born in the thirties had Louise as a middle name. It went very well with her first name. I think there was a popular film star called Louise Brooks in the twenties and thirties? I am not sure why the name would endure after that though.

Name change for this thread but I'm a 60s baby and it's my first name. I can only vaguely remember one other in my whole secondary school about 5 years younger than me. None of my classmates had it as a first name. I did work with one who was a few months older than me.

The film Gigi was late 50s, I think, and did that have the song "All the birds in the trees seem to whisper Louise" in it? Might have my wires crossed but I think that song was in the living memory of parents having kids in the 60s who wanted a French name for their daughters.

It probably became a ubiquitous middle name because it flows easily from lots of other names and is a lovely name 😀 I do really like my name and I'm glad it's my first name and I'm quite a bit older than the generation who have it as a middle name. All the girls in my school (Catholic) had Ann/e or Marie as middle names. I have neither of them. I think my parents choose lovely middle names for me and my siblings.

My daughter was born in the nineties and her middle name is Mary. She hates it. Would have probably preferred Louise.

I think the popularity of Anne in the 1950s was largely down to Princess Anne.

I think the idea of Louise being reminiscent of her grandfather's name in your DD's case is really nice.

Daughter - 1988 - middle name Helen, after her only auntie

Son - 1990 - middle name James, after my dad, who died when I was 13

Son - 1992 - made the mistake of letting my husband go and register the birth. He "couldn't think of anything", so gave him his own name as a middle name 🙄

No Louises.

When I was a child, the popular middle name was Ann/Anne.

I'm from the generation which has Louise as a middle name

I like the theory that it's a shifted generation name, so it's used to memorialise favourite relatives but not used as a first name because in the 90s Louise was strongly associated with a different generation? This is similar to the reasons we chose some of our DC's middle names, we wanted to remember relatives, but didn't particularly like the sound of the name as a first name. Looking online it seems that Louise as a first name had a popularity peak in the 1970s.

The thing of name trends is fascinating to me - especially the fact that so often people pick a name because it sounds unusual and interesting to them or they don't know many people with that name - only to find that it is then one of the top 10 names for that year. I think this probably happens because some names go in cycles, so people tend to avoid using names for babies if the name "feels like" it should belong to a grandmother or a middle aged uncle (or, indeed, every third child in your own school class). Therefore certain names get attached to a specific generation and fall out of favour for a while. But eventually, the generation who have a large amount of that name die, and because they were the great-grandparents (or older) of the current generation of new parents, that generation don't have the same association of those names as "old person names" because they don't have any memory of people in their lifetime having those names. They mainly come across them in literature for example, which makes them feel unusual and unique.

I would guess BTW this is probably where that thing comes from that so many people choose the same name while having the perception that the name is unusual - we all read the same book or watched the same film as a child, for example. Or it could simply be that in the absence of brand new names, the pool of potential names is not actually that big to begin with and if you've ruled out the "classic names" that never really go out of fashion (Jack, Elizabeth, Henry, Amelia etc) and you don't want a name associated with your own generation, your parents' generation or your grandparents' generation, then there's not that many really to pick.

I think most people with Louise as a middle name were born in the 70’s!

There are millions of teenagers now with the - Mae/ May thing going on.

And mine lol

Child of 70s and have Louise as a middle name, apparently after my GM who was Louisa - why the hell they didn’t call me that in stead of the ubiquitous Louise!