A fifth of parents regret the names they've foisted on their children, some of them from the day their kid was born, according to a new poll.
British parenting website Mumsnet recently surveyed 1362 of its members, and found 18 percent have regrets.
About a third realised it within the first six weeks and 23 percent when they started daycare or school. Twelve percent said they knew it before the child was even born, and 3 percent on the day they emerged, but stuck with the name anyway.
The most common reason given was the name being too common. The most popular baby names for boys in New Zealand last year were Joshua, Liam, Samuel, Matthew and Jack. For girls, the top were Jessica, Georgia, Emma, Olivia and Hannah.
Other popular reasons were 'it just doesn't feel right', peer pressure to choose the name, spelling and pronunciation issues and nicknames/abbreviations they doesn't like.
And what about all those poor kids now bearing the name 'Isis', which they share with an international terrorist dictatorship responsible for the brutal slaughter of thousands of innocent people?
Three percent of parents cited a "shift in public perception of the name since my child was born" that would cover that scenario. Or perhaps the 1 percent who found out their child's initials create an unfortunate acronym.
"Choosing your baby's name is one of the first things new parents do, so in some ways baby name regret is great practice for parenting - you do a lot of hard work and research, try to please several people at once, and end up getting it wrong," Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts told the BBC.
"The consolation is that most children grow into their names, and those who don't can always fall back on middle names, nicknames or, in extremis, deed polls."
Only 55 percent of parents said all their children were happy with their names. One percent reported being either incredibly bad at naming, or having spiteful children, all of them hating their given moniker.
Eight percent said if their kid changed their name, they wouldn't use it.
Newshub.
