Parenting influencers wound up at odds recently after a conversation about unique baby names went sideways.
We’ve all seen the shift in baby names over recent years, moving away from Ashleys and Johns to a wide variety of names that are remixed, spelled in interesting ways, or completely made up. Some of the shift can be chalked up to cultural factors, while some is just parents wanting to give their child a name that will stand out.
Influencers Matt & Abby are among the many people who have opinions on the latter, which they felt the need to share on a recent episode of The Unplanned Podcast.
“I’m going to be honest with you, it does kind of bug me. Some of the names that are out there nowadays, they’re just like, so off the wall,” Abby said. “You know your child is going to grow up and be an adult and potentially work in a professional setting.”
Before they turned the comment section of the video off, it was reportedly flooded with people calling out another set of influencers, Connor and Liana, for recently naming their child Koazy. This got back to Liana, who posted her own tearful response.
After explaining what prompted them to name their son such an unusual name, she refuted the idea that it was some kind of “flex,” and said reading all the hate directed at them over it was upsetting.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but it’s just different when there’s this comment section open on such a big influencer’s video of people, just, fully grown adults sat there slandering my baby’s name,” Liana said. “I think it’s quite cruel.”
On the one hand, Abby’s right that parents do have to consider how their child might fare with their given name in the future.
But in addition to there being absolutely no way to predict how people will react to names 18+ years from now, the way to ensure children’s names aren’t mocked or rejected by their peers isn’t to shame parents into choosing different names, it’s simply to stop encouraging people mock or reject names they aren’t familiar with.
The argument that certain names aren’t acceptable for professional settings is likely to age about as well as previous generations’ insistence that millennials would never be able to get real jobs if we had tattoos. And that’s not even touching on the racist history of rejecting names that maybe aren’t familiar.
Fortunately, Liana found support among her viewers, with many suggesting that what really matters is she and Connor love the name they gave their child — and Matt & Abby stopped by to apologize for “that people were being mean” and let her know they turned comments off because of it.
“Names are just words that people think sound nice,” one viewer pointed out. “I don’t understand why everyone hates on names just because they’ve never heard them before.”
