10 Times A Baby Name Choice Led To Some Awkward Family Drama

Parents-to-be face all kinds of pressure when selecting a name for their baby. A name should be cute enough for an infant yet also sufficiently dignified for an adult professional, familiar enough to be pronounceable in the language of the child’s birth country and any other languages spoken in the family, and unique enough that they won’t share a first name with half of their preschool class but not so unique that anyone is seeing the word for the first time. In other words, not too weird, not too dull. Just right.

But when parents finally settle on a name, they may find that grandparents or other relatives have feelings about it. Sherri Suzanne, a baby name consultant at My Name For Life, told HuffPost, “Rather than arguing over namesakes, the greatest conflicts I find come from generational differences in name styles.”

Today’s grandparents, Suzanne said, were part of a generation that broke away from traditional names and brought us choices like “Ashley, Brittany, Justin and Brandon,” and they don’t understand the draw of “antiques like Theodore and Hazel.”

However, some of today’s trends, such as “surname-type names, nature names, unisex names and ‘word’ names, don’t seem like names at all to many grandparents,” she added.

Many of the conflicts with grandparents that Suzanne has come across in her practice arose unexpectedly.

“In one [family], a grandfather was so saddened by the unexpected loss of his wife that he could not bear for his granddaughter to share her name, which is what the expectant mother wanted,” she said. “In another, two pregnant sisters claimed the name of a beloved relative, and the grandparents sided with one. In another, a daughter-in-law did not want her little boy to be ‘IV’ in a generation