Do you want your kids to have names that go well together?

[Hikoridikori]

If yes, why?

I mean, they will get to have different and separate lives anyway and won't be your little ones forever.

I am just wondering as I see it written a lot in threads!

Yes 100%
I think it's odd not to

So I wouldn't call one John and the other River for example. Or Joe and Wolf

Or I wouldn't go for Ethan, Bradley and then have a Josephine.

Or Charlotte, Elizabeth and then call the last child Aoife or Seamus.

Likewise I wouldn't go Aoife, Ciara, Niamh and Louisa. They don't match.

I just think it sounds discordant. My DH doesn't agree. Though our DCs names are the same kind of "vibe"

Ideally they would sound good together - I worked with sisters one had a quite posh name, the other very hippie, the names didn't suit as a pair. However, if I loved each name independently I wouldn't be put off, finding names that both parents agree on can be hard enough without other hurdles which ultimately don't mean anything.

I would, however, be mindful of trying to keep a similar level of 'normal'. I wouldn't have Konstantin and James - James might feel put out his name is boring in comparison, or Konstantin might think he drew the sort straw being more out there. I feel James and Frank, or Konstantin and Lucien work much better in that respect.

A much bigger concern for me is not having names that match, but not having them too similar - either sonically like Clara and Claudia, or from the same name root like Alex and Sacha.

I just picked names I liked. I do think they sound good together but it wasn’t part of my criteria when choosing.

I’m not really a fan of themes or matcy names but quite a lot of people I know with kids are

We just chose names we liked, I think unless your taste in names is very very varied then if you like the names they should work together ok. I did avoid names with starting with the same letter though.

Yes I think they need to ‘work’

One having a really unusual and one a super common is a tad strange, or they might wonder why

James and Charlie - fine
James and Charles - fine
JJ and Charlie - fine
JJ and Charles - weird

Growing up I went to school with triplets. Tilly, Millie and Josephine. Just seemed odd.

Tilly, Millie and Josephine.
Had they been Matilda, Millicent and Josephine or Tilly, Millie and Josie, they would have seemed more of a similar style

I must admit my mum gave my brother a name that was quite popular in the 70s/80s - sort of 80s equivalent of Oliver - and gave me an obscure Welsh name which isn’t even particularly popular in wales and I do find it a bit tiresome.

No and I find it icky when they do. Sounds odd and why would you? Just choose names you like for each individual. They are their own person.

Yes. I don't know why 🤷🏻‍♀️

We just chose names we liked. I named DD1, who has a name of Irish origin, and my husband chose the name for DD2, who has a name of Hebrew origin which is more popular in Europe than in the UK. They actually work well together as neither is 'out there'.

Sometimes I hear sibling names and think, oh, DM got to name one and DF got to name the other as the names don't seem to go

Like Hannah and Aishling
Like Grace and Áine (which if they went to a Gaelscoil would be Gráinne and Áine - grawn-ya and awn-ya)
Like Aoife, Ciara, Orla and Grace
Like my 3 brothers who got lovely Irish names and me, who got lumbered with my aunt's old fashioned English name

But better to be distinct than matchy-matchy, better to have different initials too

Like pps have said, I think sibling names make more sense when they all have a similar vibe/are of a similar naming style. I don’t like twee rhyming or matching names.

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have 3 daughters called James, Inez and Betty. I’m unreasonably bothered by how these three names are all from completely different naming styles.

Absolutely. Because they're both individuals and a sibling team. It doesn't really matter in life of course, but I always find it so weird when I come across siblings with such differing types of names.
I also like names to look equally nice written down, but then I am weird with stuff like that.

I suppose following my example, my brother is David so a name like Rebecca or Rachel would have gone a bit better. Not a big deal but it is a bit weird!

It wasn't the be all amd end all, but I didn't wang the names to sound completely discordant, or too similar - e.g. Oliver and Olivia.

Mmm

My dc have one very 70s and one very 00s name (e.g. Nicola and Oliver, David and Lily) and I do feel a bit weird about it sometimes. The 70s name is quite out there for a baby and the 00s name is supremely ordinary (but beautiful!) And I feel like people who assumed I was quirky for dc1 now think I just have no taste.

They are both family names and very meaningful to us but sometimes I wish they went together better.

Depends how you mean. I wouldn't want rhyming or very obviously matching names (Noel and Liam, say) but it might be odd if they're very obviously different styles of names.

I worked for a while in the US and had a colleague who had two children with very religious names, and then one very modern. Like Caleb, Elijah and Dixie-May. There was another who'd had a big age gap between their first three children and their fourth and had had something of a lifestyle/image change in between. (Performative hippies). It was something like James, Zoe, Emma and Phoenix.

No, but I just assume most people like similar kinds of names whenever they are deciding on one so they will inevitably be similar. I don't know if my two are matchy in that way. One is seen as a bit 80s I think but is actually ancient Greek and one is Roman but often suggested on here as a "wet" name for a boy.

I've only ever heard the word sibset on here and it annoys me disproportionately

I think even the people saying no probably do have kids names that are similar-ish because you're usually drawn to the same types of names. I'm thinking of siblings I know and I can't think of any that don't go with each other. Agree with pp that it would also a bit odd to call e.g. one child Persephone and one Ann - the weight of each name needs to match.

I would avoid obvious differences in style. Especially if I had 2 or more DC with that style.

E.g. If I had Josephine, Evangeline and Alexandrina I wouldn't name a 4th DD Ann. I would worry Ann would feel the odd one out. Or the other way round - Ann, Tess, Ruth and Alexandrina.

Similarly with origin. If I had 3 DC with Welsh names I wouldn't give the 4th a non Welsh name. This happened in my family - think 5 siblings named Eira, Siôr, Llŷr, Tesni and Malcolm. Malcolm stands out. Malcolm is the one who gets questions about whether he has a different Dad to the others/jokes about 'the milkman'.

Yes - my kids' names will have to match. DD has an old-fashioned religious name along the Margaret/Dorothy line, so I wouldn't call her sibling Justin or Gemma, for example, even though both of those are saint/religious names. The moods don't match because they were popular at very different times to DD's name. John or Elizabeth, on the other hand, would be fine.

It wouldn't bother me per se, but I might worry about how the siblings would feel if they had wildly different names if one had a popular name vs one with a terrible name. Evangeline and Ann wouldn't bother me. Nor would River and Noah. But Oedipus and Jack would.

How many people think of their own siblings' names and fret because they don't match their own? @Hollyandlilac sounds like she doesn't really like her name, rather than wishing it matched her brother's.

I think my DCs' names sound good together in that they don't rhyme, don't merge into one another and were a similar popularity when the DCs were born (although one of them has risen up the popularity charts over the past ten years). The names have different origins but both have multiple nickname options and both were more popular in the late Victorian - WW1 era than they are now. They are names DH and I liked as individual names though so they weren't chosen because they 'go'.

I do find names really interesting and do notice things e.g. families where all the children have been given a name ending in 'ie' because the parents' do, where the DD's name is a feminine version of her Dad's and the DS has a masculine version of his mum's (Josie-Joseph, Michael-Michelle), where the same letter/sound features in all the names e.g. Eileen, Maureen, Colleen or where siblings have names from very different eras e.g. Christine and Jessie. I admit to finding it strange when siblings, especially twins, are given similar names e.g. Kylie and Kyla, Claire and Clara - I've taught a few sets of identical twins with very similar names and would love to know if it's just that their parents loved one name so much that they wanted to use it for both children.

I didn't consciously look for names that 'made sense' together, but I was aware of how they sounded together. I have 3 DC and find myself writing their names together quite regularly and obviously saying their names throughout the day etc. I wanted them to sound lovely as a trio, because as much as they are individuals, they are also siblings and I wanted that connection with their names.