The Letters Keep Coming
Laura Wattenberg has spent years reading parents’ baby-name questions, first as author of “The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby” and later through her blog of the same name. No government agency tracks how often parents legally change a child’s first name, so there’s no official statistic here. But as a share of her mail, she says, messages from parents who regret the name they already chose have been climbing. One inbox isn’t a national study. Still, it raises a real question: why would regret be rising now, when naming a baby has never been easier?
More Options Should Mean Less Regret, Right?
Parents today can browse name databases with tens of thousands of entries, far more than any earlier generation had. In England in 1800, just six names covered half of all babies born. By 1950 in the United States, that number had grown to 79. By 2012, it took 546 different names to cover half of all American babies, a huge jump in variety.
So here’s the puzzle: if more choice makes decisions better, shouldn’t parents with history’s biggest menu be the happiest with what they ordered? Something doesn’t add up.
The Paradox of Choice, Applied to a Crib
There’s a name for this contradiction: the paradox of choice, a concept developed by Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore College, in his 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.” His finding runs against intuition. Past a certain point, more options make decisions harder, not easier, and more likely to end in regret, even when the final choice is perfectly good.
The mechanism is simple once you see it: choosing from a huge pool takes real mental effort, which breeds fatigue, and once you know you picked from thousands of options, it’s easy to imagine the slightly better one you never considered. That imagined rival is what keeps nagging at you.
Apply that to a nursery: every name chosen is also thousands of names rejected, and the brain doesn’t let that go quietly.
Wanted: A Name That’s Beautiful and No One Else Has
Modern parents usually want two things at once: a name that sounds appealing and one that feels rare, a combination that undoes itself the moment it works. A name admired enough to catch on stops being rare. Names now carry a stronger signal, Wattenberg notes, than they did when little Johns and Marys were everywhere.
The stakes feel real. Research she points to found boys with more feminine-sounding names face more school discipline problems, likely tied to teasing, and a 2003 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found identical resumes got more callbacks under names read as “white” rather than “black.” So parents search harder, and some baby-name reference books have grown to around 140,000 entries, though many of those totals simply count every spelling variant separately. A bigger haystack means more ways to wonder, later, if you grabbed the wrong piece.
A Trend, or a Trend in One Inbox?
Let’s be precise about what’s actually known here. Wattenberg’s sense that regret is rising comes from her own mail and a two-part post on her blog, not from a formal study or legal name-change records. She gives no specific year or decade for comparison, just a pattern she’s watched build.
The psychology underneath is better established. Schwartz’s paradox of choice is well documented in decision research generally, even if it wasn’t built around baby names specifically. A 2019 follow-up by Wattenberg into why parents regret their choices found that the strongest predictor wasn’t the size of the name pool at all. It was whether the choice felt freely made. Choice overload may be part of the story. It isn’t the whole story.
Hello, My Name Is… a Different Kind of Risk
There’s an obvious workaround to the paradox of choice: skip the crowd entirely and pick something nobody else would, the “Hello, My Name Is McLovin” end of the spectrum. It sounds like a loophole. But a one-of-a-kind name was still chosen over thousands of alternatives, and whether that gamble produces less regret down the line, or just a different kind of it, hasn’t actually been measured. Maybe that’s the real lesson here: no name on the list comes with a guarantee.