NAMESAKE GUIDE
How to Choose a Baby Name
A traced, practitioner-grade method for finding a name you and your child can live with — and surfacing the real disagreements the books refuse to settle
By Mike West, author of People Analytics for Dummies — grounded in 10 books of the naming canon
Updated June 2026
The path
This guide is for an expectant parent — usually a couple — staring at an endless list of names and a single permanent decision. The corpus agrees on the journey even where it argues about the details: a name is, first, a thing with sound; that sound and its meaning create a felt sense of fit; fit and meaning produce confidence and agreement between two parents; confidence is what produces a child who lives well with the name and parents who don't regret the choice years later. We walk that chain in order. Along the way we name the wrong models people carry — that there's a 'normal' name, that unique is always better, that a name dictates destiny — and replace them with the model the books actually support. Where the books genuinely disagree (how much a name causes versus merely correlates, whether to chase distinctiveness or flee it), we map the camps instead of faking a single answer.
- 1. Sound is the first, most concrete property of a name and the base layer the felt sense of fit is built on — it enables fit, so it comes first.
- 2. Before you can judge fit, you need to know what cohort a name puts your child in; popularity moderates whether a name reads as classic, dated, or strange.
- 3. Meaning is the engine that feeds the next three things at once: the social signal, the sense of fit, and the confidence to commit.
- 4. Meaning produces an image the name broadcasts before anyone meets your child; reading that signal is part of choosing responsibly.
- 5. Sound, popularity, and meaning converge into the felt 'rightness' that fit names; fit is the hinge between evaluating a name and the outcomes that follow.
- 6. Fit and meaning produce a state of certainty and unity between parents — the thing that actually carries the decision over the line.
- 7. Confidence and fit produce the child's lifelong experience of the name — one of the two outcomes the whole process exists to protect.
- 8. The terminal outcome: enduring contentment with no regret, produced by confidence up front and a child who lives well with the name.
Phonetic & Aesthetic Name Attributes
A name is, before anything else, a sound you will say tens of thousands of times. The phonetic and aesthetic layer covers rhythm, meter, syllable count, the way the first name flows into the middle and last name, and the initials and full-name combination it produces. The Baby Name Wizard treats a name's style as 'a complex, analyzable recipe of data-driven factors,' and phonetic attractiveness — the rhythm, rhyme, and flow of syllables on their own and against the surname — is the most basic ingredient. This is the foundation because the felt sense of fit is built on it: a name that fights the surname or hides an ugly initial set will never feel right no matter how rich its meaning.
Why it matters. Parents fall for a first name in isolation and discover the problem only when the baby is born and the full name is read aloud at the doctor's office. The Everything Baby Names Book and Baby Names Your Child Can Live With both insist you think logically about how the full name sounds, the nicknames it invites, and what the initials spell — because a name that produces a mocking monogram or a tongue-twisting cadence becomes a daily inconvenience the child carries, not the parent.
The myth: If I love the first name, the sound is settled.
The reality: Sound is judged in combination. The Baby Name Wizard defines phonetic attractiveness as the flow of a name 'both on its own and in combination with a middle and last name.' A beautiful first name can collide with the surname's rhythm or stack into bad initials.
The myth: Nicknames and initials are minor details to sort out later.
The reality: Baby Names Your Child Can Live With makes them a deliberate evaluation step: think through the nicknames a name invites and what the initials spell before you commit, because the child lives with both.
How to
- Say the full name aloud — first, middle, last — several times, in a normal speaking voice and in a calling-across-the-yard voice.
- Write out the initials and check the monogram for anything embarrassing or that spells a word.
- Test the rhythm against the surname: many parents find a multi-syllable first name balances a short surname and vice versa (The Baby Name Wizard's recipe view of style).
- List the obvious nicknames and short forms and decide whether you can live with all of them, since you don't control which one sticks (Baby Names Your Child Can Live With).
- Watch where the first name ends and the surname begins — adjacent matching sounds can slur together when spoken.
Watch out for
- Falling in love with a name on the page before you've heard it in a sentence.
- Odd spellings chosen for looks that wreck the name's practicality and pronunciation — The Everything Baby Names Book warns these create lifelong friction for the child.
- Ignoring a bad initial set because the first name is so appealing; the initials don't go away.
Grounded in: The Baby Name Wizard · Baby Names Your Child Can Live With · The Everything Baby Names Book · The 2013 Baby Names Almanac
Name Popularity & Trend Context
Every name sits somewhere on a curve from saturated to rare, and that position is moving. Popularity context covers a name's current rank, its trajectory across eras (classic, dated, modern, retro), and how concentrated or fragmented it is. The almanacs add a crucial correction: apparent popularity must be adjusted for spelling variants and gender skew before you can read it accurately. The Baby Name Wizard's 'historical usage pattern' explains why a name carries an image — a name that peaked decades ago reads as dated, one rising now reads as fresh. This context moderates fit: the same name can feel right or wrong depending on the cohort it puts your child in.
Why it matters. Choose without checking the trajectory and you can land your child in a kindergarten class with three others sharing the name, or saddle them with something so dated it signals the wrong era. A Is for Atticus urges you to weigh a name's popularity trajectory before choosing, precisely because the rank you see is a snapshot of a moving thing — a name climbing fast will be far more common by the time your child is in school than the chart suggests today.
The myth: There are still 'normal' names that carry no statement.
The reality: The Baby Name Wizard is blunt: 'Every name choice makes a statement; there are no longer normal names.' Even a plain choice now signals something against a landscape of distinctive ones.
The myth: The popularity rank I see is the real popularity.
The reality: The 2013 and 2014 Almanacs show apparent popularity is distorted by spelling variants and gender distribution. A name that looks rare may be common once you combine its spellings; a 'unisex' name may skew hard to one sex.
The myth: To be distinctive I have to reject the trends.
The reality: The 2013 Almanac argues distinctiveness 'can be achieved by adapting a trend rather than rejecting it' — personalizing a rising style rather than inventing something from scratch.
How to
- Look up the current rank AND the multi-year movement, not just this year's number (A Is for Atticus; the Almanacs).
- Combine the spelling variants before judging rarity — the Almanacs' fragmentation point means the 'underlying' name may be far more common than any single spelling.
- For a gender-neutral candidate, check the gender skew so you know which way the name leans in practice (2014 Almanac's gender association skew).
- Decide deliberately where on the saturated-to-rare spectrum you want your child to sit — and recognize the books offer no single right answer here (see Tensions).
- If you want freshness without strangeness, adapt a current style rather than coining something unprecedented.
Watch out for
- Reading a name as rare because you only checked one spelling.
- Chasing the top of the chart and producing a name your child shares with several classmates.
- Treating the almanacs' aggregate, market-level view of popularity as advice about your one decision — they describe how names spread, which is context, not a recommendation.
Grounded in: The Baby Name Wizard · A Is for Atticus · The 2013 Baby Names Almanac · The 2014 Baby Names Almanac · Baby Names Your Child Can Live With · 100,000+ Baby Names
Name Meaning & Personal/Cultural Significance
Meaning is the load-bearing construct of the whole sequence — it feeds three outcomes at once. A name's significance can be ancestral (heritage, family history, namesakes), faith-based, literary, or symbolic. A Is for Atticus is built entirely on this: choose names that are 'meaningful, not merely pretty,' mining literature for names with a story and cultural pedigree. 100,000+ Baby Names operationalizes it as 'consideration of meaningful sources' — deliberately brainstorming from family, heritage, historical figures, literary characters, and meaningful places. Meaning is what later lets the child 'hold on to' the name, in Baby Names Your Child Can Live With's phrase, and what gives parents the conviction that produces confidence.
Why it matters. A name chosen only for sound is a name with no story to tell, and the books are unanimous that the story is what carries the choice through the years. Baby Names Your Child Can Live With's instruction — 'make the name mean something so the child can hold on to that meaning' — points at a concrete consequence: when a child or a doubting relative asks 'why this name?', a meaningful answer settles it, while an arbitrary one invites second-guessing. Meaning is also the bridge to confidence: 100,000+ Baby Names ties parental confidence directly to a process that drew on personally significant sources.
The myth: The dictionary meaning of the name (its etymology) is what matters.
The reality: The corpus weights personal and cultural significance over etymology. A Is for Atticus prizes literary and family resonance; 100,000+ Baby Names lists family, heritage, places, and namesakes. The meaning that holds is the one that means something to your family, not a translation in a name book.
The myth: Meaning is a nice-to-have you add after you've picked a sound you like.
The reality: In the relationship map, meaning enables fit, social signal, AND confidence — it is upstream of all three. Skipping it doesn't just lose a story; it weakens the felt rightness and the certainty that follow.
How to
- Brainstorm explicitly from meaningful sources: family members, ancestry, faith, historical figures, beloved books, places that matter to you (100,000+ Baby Names; A Is for Atticus).
- For each finalist, write the one-sentence story you'd tell your child about why you chose it — if you can't, the meaning may be thin.
- If honoring a relative, decide whether to use the name directly, as a middle name, or adapted — Baby Names Your Child Can Live With treats heritage and personal taste as something to balance, not blindly obey.
- Check that the meaning you value isn't undercut by an unfortunate association or image (covered next section).
Watch out for
- Mistaking a pretty sound for a meaningful name — A Is for Atticus's core warning.
- Over-honoring tradition at the cost of a name your child must actually wear; The Everything Baby Names Book frames it as balancing heritage with the realities the child faces.
- The deterministic overreach: The Art of Baby Nameology claims a name's letter composition generates personality and destiny via numerology. This is the corpus's outlier — treat meaning as significance you assign, not a force the name exerts (see Tensions).
Grounded in: A Is for Atticus · 100,000+ Baby Names · Baby Names Your Child Can Live With · The Baby Name Wizard · The Everything Baby Names Book · The Art of Baby Nameology
Ready to stop discussing and start choosing?
Start the Name Wizard →Perceived Name Image & Social Signal
A name arrives before the person does. The social signal is the character association and mental image a name conjures about both the child and the parents prior to meeting. A Is for Atticus profiles each name for its 'perceived name image' — the impression it conveys. The Everything Baby Names Book extends this to the parents, noting that a name reflects 'parental expectations and status,' the conscious and unconscious aspirations a parent projects through the choice. This is downstream of meaning: the meaning a name carries is much of what generates its image.
Why it matters. Choose without reading the signal and you can broadcast something you didn't intend — pretension, a class signal, a dated or eccentric impression — that follows your child into every first introduction and résumé. The Baby Name Wizard's framing that 'every name choice makes a statement' means you are signaling whether you mean to or not; the only choice is whether you read your own signal before others do.
The myth: People will judge my child on who they are, not their name.
The reality: The whole point of social signal is that the name does its work 'prior to meeting.' A Is for Atticus and The Everything Baby Names Book both treat the pre-acquaintance impression as real and worth managing.
The myth: A name guarantees the future it signals — an 'important' name makes an important person.
The reality: Here the corpus splits and the evidence is thin. The Everything Baby Names Book explicitly hedges whether a name causally affects life opportunities or is merely correlated, and no other book supports a causal claim. Read the signal as a first impression to manage, not a destiny to bank on (see Tensions).
How to
- For each finalist, write down the first three associations it triggers — picture the adult, not just the baby (A Is for Atticus's image profiling).
- Ask a few people outside your household what image the name conjures, since the signal lives in others' perceptions.
- Check whether the signal you're sending matches the meaning you intend — a heritage name with an unintended pop-culture association can pull against itself.
- Notice what the name says about you as parents; The Everything Baby Names Book's point about parental expectations cuts both ways.
Watch out for
- Confusing your private affection for a name with the public image it carries.
- Banking on a name to confer success — the causal claim is unsupported and explicitly hedged in the one book that raises it.
- Anchoring the image on the cute baby and ignoring the adult, the professional, the grandparent who will carry it longest.
Grounded in: A Is for Atticus · The Everything Baby Names Book · The Baby Name Wizard
Perceived Parent-Name Fit
Fit is the felt sense that a name is 'right' — that it suits your taste, your surname, your values. The Baby Name Wizard names it 'perceived fit with parental taste' and concedes it is 'often difficult to articulate but represents a key component of a satisfying choice.' Fit is the hinge of the whole sequence: sound enables it, popularity moderates it, meaning feeds it, and fit in turn produces the child's positive experience. It is where the analytical work converts into a gut verdict you can trust because you did the work.
Why it matters. Fit is what people mean when they say 'we just knew.' But the books are clear that a trustworthy 'we just knew' comes after the evaluation, not instead of it — The Everything Baby Names Book ends on 'the one that ultimately feels right in your heart,' yet only after chapters of weighing sound, spelling, teasing, and heritage. Skip the work and the gut feeling is just impulse, the thing Baby Names Your Child Can Live With and 100,000+ Baby Names both warn produces regret.
The myth: Fit is a magical instant feeling — either a name gives you chills or it doesn't.
The reality: The Baby Name Wizard reframes the search: 'Narrow up your name list by finding delight, not down by finding fault.' Fit emerges from actively seeking what you love across candidates, not waiting passively for lightning.
The myth: If it fits us, that's all that matters.
The reality: Baby Names Your Child Can Live With's whole premise is a double test: a name you can live with AND that your child can live with. Parental fit is necessary but not sufficient — it must survive the child's lifelong vantage point (next section).
How to
- Build the list by 'narrowing up' — collect names that delight you rather than eliminating names for flaws (The Baby Name Wizard).
- For finalists, test fit against the surname and against your stated values, not just against your ear.
- Notice the Wizard's deeper claim: 'A great name becomes a perfect name when it belongs to your child' — fit can deepen after the choice, so don't demand certainty be total before committing.
- Run finalists past the popularity context again: the same name fits differently if it's about to flood the kindergarten.
Watch out for
- Following fads or celebrity choices and calling the borrowed enthusiasm 'fit' — Baby Names Your Child Can Live With names this as the failure mode.
- Letting an inarticulate 'no' from a partner go unexamined; fit that one parent can't feel isn't shared fit.
- Demanding a perfect-fit feeling before the baby exists — the Wizard says perfection arrives partly through belonging.
Grounded in: The Baby Name Wizard · Baby Names Your Child Can Live With · The Everything Baby Names Book
Parental Naming Confidence & Agreement
Confidence is the state of certainty, unity, and freedom from second-guessing that a good process produces — and it is the gateway to both lasting outcomes. 100,000+ Baby Names defines parental confidence and agreement precisely as the feeling 'resulting from a process that is perceived as both thorough and collaborative.' It is not a mood you summon; it is the residue of having done the evaluation together. In the relationship map, meaning enables it and it produces both the child's experience and long-term satisfaction. This is the construct that two-parent households most often fail at — not for lack of a good name, but for lack of genuine agreement on it.
Why it matters. A name chosen over a partner's quiet reservation becomes the name one parent privately resents, and 100,000+ Baby Names and The Everything Baby Names Book both treat partner disagreement as a primary failure mode of the whole process. Confidence without real agreement is brittle — it cracks the first time someone criticizes the name. The fix is structural: a systematic, collaborative method that lets both parents score candidates rather than negotiate from gut positions.
The myth: Confidence comes from finding the one perfect name.
The reality: 100,000+ Baby Names locates confidence in the process, not the name — it is the product of thoroughness and collaboration. Two parents who evaluated together can be confident in a merely very-good name; two who didn't will second-guess a great one.
The myth: If we disagree, one of us should just defer.
The reality: Deferral produces apparent agreement, not real unity — and the resentment surfaces later as namer's remorse. The corpus's answer is a structured shared process (systematic evaluation of criteria) that surfaces and resolves the disagreement rather than burying it.
How to
- Agree on your criteria first — sound, meaning, popularity tolerance, teasing risk — then score candidates against them together (100,000+ Baby Names' systematic evaluation).
- Make the process collaborative by construction: both parents contribute names and both rate finalists, so the final choice is jointly owned.
- Treat a persistent reservation as data, not obstruction — surface why it's there and test it against the criteria.
- Use the structure to depersonalize disagreement: you're comparing names against agreed standards, not defending egos.
- Don't rush to a verdict before both parents feel the thoroughness; confidence depends on perceived thoroughness, not speed.
Watch out for
- A false consensus where one partner caved — it predicts later regret.
- Mistaking exhaustion for agreement; running out of energy is not the same as being unified.
- Skipping the criteria step and arguing name-by-name, which turns the process into negotiation instead of evaluation.
Grounded in: 100,000+ Baby Names · The Baby Name Wizard · The Everything Baby Names Book
Child Livability & Positive Name Experience
This is the outcome that the entire process exists to protect: the child's favorable lifelong experience with their name. 100,000+ Baby Names defines it as a positive self-concept tied to the name, social ease, and the absence of persistent ridicule, confusion, or misspelling. The Everything Baby Names Book adds 'personal identity congruence' — the extent to which the child embraces the name as an authentic part of who they are. Baby Names Your Child Can Live With makes this the organizing principle of the entire book, sorting names by risk so parents can choose one the child can actually live with happily. Fit produces this; this in turn produces parental satisfaction.
Why it matters. Every earlier decision is provisional until you check it against the person who will carry the name for eighty years and never chose it. The concrete failure is teasing and daily friction: Baby Names Your Child Can Live With organizes thousands of names by risk level precisely because anticipating the teasing trap, the awkward initials, and the unwanted nickname before birth is the only point at which you can prevent them. After birth the name is fixed and the child absorbs the cost.
The myth: My child will love whatever name I love.
The reality: The child's experience is its own construct with its own determinants — social reception, identity congruence, teasing risk. The Everything Baby Names Book insists you 'consider the name from the child's perspective,' a vantage point parents systematically forget while admiring the baby.
The myth: A truly unique name guarantees a positive experience because the child stands out.
The reality: Standing out cuts both ways. The same distinctiveness parents prize can become the teasing or constant-correction the child endures. The corpus has no consensus on the optimal popularity level — this is a genuine tension to navigate, not a solved problem (see Tensions).
How to
- Run each finalist through the child's-perspective checklist: likely nicknames, what the initials spell, misspelling and mispronunciation burden, teasing angles (Baby Names Your Child Can Live With; The Everything Baby Names Book).
- Picture the name on an adult — a job applicant, a doctor, a grandparent — not only on an infant.
- Weigh distinctiveness explicitly against teasing and daily-friction risk rather than assuming unique is safe.
- Give the child a fallback: a middle name or shortenable form provides room to maneuver if the first name doesn't fit their grown self (a practical reading of identity congruence).
Watch out for
- Odd spellings that doom the child to a lifetime of correcting and clarifying — flagged by The Everything Baby Names Book as a practicality failure.
- Over-uniqueness pursued for the parents' distinctiveness motivation at the child's expense.
- Assuming social reception is fixed — The Everything Baby Names Book treats it as the environment's response, partly outside your control, which is exactly why you reduce avoidable risk up front.
Grounded in: Baby Names Your Child Can Live With · 100,000+ Baby Names · The Everything Baby Names Book · A Is for Atticus
Long-Term Parental Naming Satisfaction
The terminal outcome: enduring contentment and pride, with no 'namer's remorse,' over a lifetime. 100,000+ Baby Names defines it as the joint product of two things — the parents' initial confidence in the decision and their observation of the child's positive experience with the name. That is the whole sequence resolving: a thorough, collaborative process produced confidence; fit produced the child's good experience; together they produce a parent who, years on, has no regret. The Baby Name Wizard captures the felt version — a name you love 'free from angst and second-guessing' with a story to tell your child about why it was chosen with love.
Why it matters. Satisfaction is the only outcome you can't fix later, and it is built entirely from inputs you control before birth. 100,000+ Baby Names' formulation is the practical key: because satisfaction = confidence × the child's experience, a parent who skipped the collaborative process or ignored the child's vantage point has already mortgaged their future contentment, no matter how the name sounds. Regret is not bad luck; it is usually a process failure cashing in years later.
The myth: Whether I'm happy with the name in twenty years is largely luck.
The reality: 100,000+ Baby Names makes satisfaction the determinate result of two upstream things you control: the confidence your process produced and the experience your choices gave the child. You build it; you don't roll for it.
The myth: Once the name is registered, satisfaction is locked in for better or worse.
The reality: The Baby Name Wizard's 'a great name becomes a perfect name when it belongs to your child' means satisfaction can deepen as the name fuses with the person — so a sound, well-considered choice tends to grow on you rather than wear off.
How to
- Before finalizing, confirm both inputs are in place: genuine confidence and agreement (did the process feel thorough and collaborative?) and a name that clears the child's-experience checklist.
- Write down the story of why you chose the name — the Wizard's 'special story to tell your child' both records your reasoning and tests whether your conviction is real.
- Stress-test against the ten-years-out view: imagine defending the choice when your child is a teenager, then when they're applying for a job.
- Accept that some uncertainty is normal and resolves through belonging — don't mistake ordinary pre-birth nerves for a wrong choice.
Watch out for
- Regret traced back to a buried partner disagreement — the most common process failure that surfaces as long-term dissatisfaction.
- Chasing a trend that satisfies you this year but dates badly, eroding contentment as the name's image shifts.
- Confusing the relief of finally deciding with durable satisfaction; the two feel similar at registration and diverge over years.
Grounded in: 100,000+ Baby Names · The Baby Name Wizard · The Everything Baby Names Book · Baby Names That Go Together
Where the books disagree
Does a name cause a child's traits and destiny, or merely signal and correlate? The Art of Baby Nameology asserts, via Pythagorean numerology, that a name's letter composition deterministically generates personality, strengths, and life path. Every other book in the corpus treats the name as a social and aesthetic signal whose effects run through perception and parental choice.
- Numerological determinism (The Art of Baby Nameology): the name's letters dictate character and compatibility.
- Social-signal consensus (the other nine books): the name shapes impressions and choices, not the person's intrinsic traits.
Weigh by evidence type. The deterministic claim rests on assertion within a numerological system, with no empirical support and no corroboration anywhere else in the corpus — it is the clear outlier. The signal view is shared across nine books. Use Nameology, if at all, as a source of meaning you assign to a name, the way you'd use a literary reference — not as a prediction of who your child will become. Note that even the social-signal camp hedges its strongest version: The Everything Baby Names Book explicitly declines to say whether names cause life opportunities or merely correlate, and no book establishes causation. Treat any 'this name will make my child X' claim as unsupported.
Is distinctiveness something to maximize or a risk to avoid? The corpus pulls both ways and never settles on an optimal popularity level.
- Distinctiveness-as-value: the Almanacs note distinctiveness is increasingly prized (and can be achieved by adapting a trend); A Is for Atticus chases fresh, uncommon, meaningful names.
- Distinctiveness-as-risk: Baby Names Your Child Can Live With and The Everything Baby Names Book warn that over-uniqueness, odd spellings, and unusual names raise teasing and daily-friction risk for the child.
This is genuinely context-contingent, not a settled question — there is no consensus optimum, so choose for your situation. Decide whose interest is binding: the parents' distinctiveness motivation or the child's livability. The corpus's most workable middle path is the 2013 Almanac's: get distinctiveness by adapting a current style rather than coining something unprecedented, which buys freshness without the worst spelling-and-teasing costs. If your surname is already unusual or hard to spell, lean common on the first name to reduce the child's total friction. If you live somewhere a name floods every classroom, a moderately less common choice protects identity. Make the trade-off explicit and shared between partners rather than defaulting.
Is popularity an input to your decision or an outcome of the culture? The 2013 and 2014 Almanacs model popularity as a result of pop-culture exposure, celebrity endorsement, and media events — an aggregate, market-level view. Most other books treat popularity as a contextual condition you read before choosing — an input to your individual decision.
- Aggregate/market view (the Almanacs): popularity is an outcome produced by cultural exposure, trackable and forecastable.
- Individual-decision view (most books): popularity is a fixed context you check and respond to when choosing one name.
These aren't contradictory; they operate at different levels of analysis, and conflating them causes errors. Use the almanacs' forecasting to anticipate where a name is heading — a name rising on a celebrity or media wave will be more common by the time your child is in school than its current rank suggests. Then use the individual-decision view to choose: treat that projected popularity as the context your child will actually inhabit. The practical synthesis is to read the trajectory (market view) and decide your tolerance (decision view), rather than treating today's snapshot rank as the whole story.
Scope: two books in the corpus model something adjacent to, but distinct from, choosing a single name. Baby Naming Ceremonies models the celebration event; Baby Names That Go Together models sibling-set cohesion.
- Single-name choice (the core of this guide): the eight constructs above.
- Adjacent decisions: harmonizing sibling names (alliteration, phonetic resonance, thematic consistency) and planning a welcome ceremony.
Keep these peripheral to the core choice but use them where they apply. If you already have children, Baby Names That Go Together's harmonizing strategies (alliteration, phonetic resonance, shared theme) become an added fit criterion — the new name should stand alone AND complement the set, and the book ties cohesive sibling names to parental satisfaction and pride. The ceremony is downstream of the choice entirely; Baby Naming Ceremonies is about how you celebrate and announce the name, not how you select it. Don't let the celebration's logistics pull focus from the decision, and don't let sibling-set harmony override the single name's livability for the individual child.