> My wife, who teached preschool aged children in government preschools, finds > seemingly endless variations on names. I wonder whether it has anything to do > with a desire on the part of parents to give their children a distinctive > identity. I also wonder whether it instead impales the young person on a pike > of explaining their whole life that there name is pronounced and spelled this > way rather than what many prople would assume might be that way... and whether > the parent would do such a thing if they had such a name themselves.
I have wondered exactly the same thing. I suspect it demonstrates a striving to establish a unique identity in a world where, by shear force of numbers, many other people have the same name. As an exercise, try typing your first and last name into the Google search engine and you will find out just how non-unique you are. However, what bothers me about many parents is that the names they give their children are really all about the parents, so the children are seen as an extension of the parent's identity. Surely a recipe for disaster! In the astronomy world, some parents have given their children names like "Perihelion". Names are very important things, for they contribute to a person's self-concept. What difference would it make to you if you changed your name to Shirley, or Cecily, or Leonard or Rastus. For this reason I think people should be encouraged and enabled to change their name as they see fit, preferably at a reasonably early age. I must check with the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages regards whether a birth certificate can be re-issued with the new name. I have parishioners in their 80s who have finally summoned the courage to change their name. Yet it is interesting to see the resistance from others. Imagine the psychological barriers to a child changing his or her name, and the resistance from parents. It reminds me of the boy in an SRE class where we were discussing the meaning of our names, ultimately in relation to the names given to Jesus. When I asked did he know the meaning of his name he replied "yes; it means my parents are dickheads!". - Greg ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
