How the Business of Baby Naming Has Changed Over the Decades: 'There Was a Lot Less Pressure'

Choosing a baby name has become so much more complicated in recent years — especially as the pressure to find the perfect moniker has risen. That’s why many parents-to-be are turning to baby name consultants like Hannah Emery to help them choose a meaningful name for their little one.

Emery, consultant at Janus Name Journeys, has a PhD in sociology of identity from UC Berkley. And she recently joined host Anne Helen Petersen on her Culture Study Podcast to talk about a huge range of baby-name issues — including why people need help choosing them.

“I think sometimes people scoff at like, oh, well, why would you need a consultant? Or why would you need someone to help you with this?” Petersen said on the Feb. 25 podcast episode.

She then compared it to hiring an interior designer. “When you know what you like and what you don’t like, but you don’t know necessarily how you want things to come together,” Petersen explained. “And you don’t necessarily, this is not your skillset, this is not the place. Like you just don’t have a lot of confidence in it, and you just need someone with more of a skillset to kind of guide you in your taste.”

Enter Emery, who helps parents choose names for babies and has even helped adults who want to choose new names after coming out as nonbinary or transgender. Emery interviewed parents of kids born in the early aughts for her dissertation 15 years ago, which led her to discover that many parents felt a naming pressure, like, “I am giving my child this cultural product, and I need to make sure it’s the right kind of cultural product.”

She also interviewed parents of kids born in the 1970s and ’80s. “And I had a lot of people who said, yeah, I wanted something that was a little bit different, but not weird like they’re doing now,” Emery recalled. “And there was a lot less pressure. It was just like, I wanted to pick something I liked.”

Emery’s own mom consulted a baby book for help in choosing the name Hannah. “My name is a little unusual for someone born in the early ’80s,” she says, and her mom told her she wanted something that was “a little bit different.” But her mom didn’t have the internet, she said, so she had to “take her name dictionary and be like, okay, of the 1200 names in this book, this is one that I like the sound of but that I haven’t heard before.”

These days, people are wanting to know “all the names that exist” and what they mean, according to Petersen, to which Emery said the “business of baby naming” has changed significantly. Now, the “most popular naming website” is Nameberry, created by Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz, previously of Glamour.

“It’s, here are some names, and then here’s our professional opinion on the style associated with those names,” Emery explained — a change from the self-driven simplicity for parents of Gen Xers.

Elsewhere in the interview, Emery talked about how parents yearn to have a story behind the names they choose.

“I think people feel like the name needs to have a really good story,” Emery said, “whether [that means] it needs to be a family name or have a really, really important linguistic meaning, or it needs to be tied to our heritage or… it’s different for different families.” On books and websites about baby naming, she says, “there’s all this rhetoric about ‘this is the most important gift you can give your child,’ ‘This is so, so, so, so important,’ that people are like, ‘Oh, well I can’t just say we liked it and we thought it sounded pretty,’ right?”

But that “is a name story too,” she said. “Saying, ‘This was my favorite name and I gave it to you,’ like, that is also special.”

If you need more baby name ideas for your little one, check out our helpful guides HERE.

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