Doing The Right Thing Starts Early

Baby Names

We love and care for our children. They become our entire world and give us a reason to live. Raising kids, watching them grow, and experiencing their lives is perhaps the biggest, most important thing a person will ever do.

As it’s such an awesome responsibility, we need to stop and remember childhood. How was childhood for us? What did we like and dislike about our experiences growing up?

We want our children to be special. In our eyes, they are the most special people in the world. From the day they come into our lives there’s nothing more beautiful to us than that little bundle of joy. Sure, they may change over time. Sometimes those changes will both disappoint and confound us as adults. Do we want to start them down a hard path from day one?

When we give our children a name, it’s one of the very first acts of parenting and it is the one act of parenting that will have the furthest reaching effects on our child’s life. As a parent, the debate between his mother and me over what to name him took months. We thought it was a serious obligation to bestow a name upon our son that was both fitting and wouldn’t create a source of grief in his life.

However, some prefer a sense of whimsy when they name their children. My mother was one of them, even though the name she chose wasn’t going to cause me trouble. She chose to name me after an actor, Jason Robards. Jason is quite common in the list of names. At one of my employers, I knew four other Jasons that were colleagues.

The Advantages Of Common Names

Remember grade school. When we look back at our time in school, the more commonly named kids tended to be the most popular. It’s a long-standing belief that kids with more common names fared better than those with unusual names or ones with negative associations. The unfortunate children given names that were strange or brought on negative associations tended to be less accepted, and later in life have struggled with being rejected more by possible partners in the dating world.

According to Children’s Folklore Review, 95% of the American population carries 1% of the available names.

Baby’s Named After Marvel Characters

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the biggest movies of our lives have been a source for people to pull baby names from. One, in particular, rings out because of the character. Unlike traditional names like Tony, Peter, Steve, or even Natasha, Wanda, or Carol, people have been naming their kids after the Mad Titan himself.

An article on relevantmagazing.com revealed that the name Thanos has not only become popular but has made a huge jump on the Social Security Administration’s Name Popularity Index. Thanos has jumped 2,892 spots since 2018 and the release of Avengers: Infinity War.

“Bring Me Thanos!”

— Thor, Infinity War

Thanos is now the ninth most popular baby name based on characters under the Disney umbrella. The article was right to find this both interesting and almost insulting. It’s ahead of Elsa and Elsa is a real name. Besides that, Thanos is the name of a genocidal alien in the movies. Would you name your children after Adolf Hitler, or Sadaam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden?

If you’re thinking about naming your kid Thanos, think about the cautionary tale of the comics. Thanos’ mother and father both met their demise at the hands of Thanos. If you haven’t seen the movies, Thanos does murder his own daughter in Infinity War. Take a look at this first introduction of the children of Thanos in Infinity War. Your grandchildren will likely be known as the Children Of Thanos.

Thoughts On Baby Names

We owe it to our children to start them off in a good way. That starts with the name that they’ll carry for the rest of their lives. Naming them with something popular, like Thanos, or something controversial, is going to create problems further down the road. In a perfect world, we could see our kid's futures. Since we can’t, don’t we owe it to them to thoroughly consider the names we might bestow upon them before making anything final?