Why Do Kids Think Names Are Weird? What Teachers And Parents Should Know
I was calling attendance in my second-grade classroom last Tuesday when I got to Xochitl, and I paused just long enough to double-check the pronunciation I’d confirmed with her mom on the first day of school. Before I could say it, Jax, a boy in the back row with a hole in the knee of his jeans, yelled out, “That’s a weird name!” A couple of his friends snickered, and Xochitl folded her arms over the dinosaur sticker on her notebook and hunched down in her chair.
I’ve been teaching for eight years, and this moment has played out in some version every few months. A year ago it was Kairos, a little boy whose parents were pastors, whose name got called weird. Six months before that it was Moana, a Samoan-American girl whose name got tied to the Disney movie by the kids, then called weird once the movie hype died down. After Jax spoke up, I didn’t do what I used to do – I didn’t snap that it’s rude to make fun of people’s names and move on. I just leaned against my desk and asked Jax, “What makes it weird?” He blinked, quit grinning, and shrugged. “I never heard it before. It sounds funny.”
That answer almost always surprises new teachers and parents, but it’s the truth 9 times out of 10. Kids are literal, and they don’t have much of a filter. “Weird” just means “unfamiliar” to most of them. It doesn’t always mean they’re being intentionally cruel.
I turned to Xochitl and asked, “Do you want to tell us how you got your name? Only if you want to.” She thought for a second, then unfolded her arms and said it was her great grandma’s name, from Oaxaca, and it means flower. One of the other girls raised her hand and said, “My middle name is Rose, that’s a flower too!” Suddenly it wasn’t weird anymore, it was just Xochitl’s flower name from her grandma.
After class, Jax hung around by my desk, twisting the hem of his shirt. He said he didn’t mean to make Xochitl sad. I told him I knew that, that most of the time when people call a name weird, it just means they haven’t met anyone with that name before.
A lot of parents ask me these days, whether at conferences or in parent group chats: are kids getting weirder names? Is it bad to pick a name that’s not common? I had a mom email me last month, panicking a week before her son started kindergarten, saying she and her husband named him Bear, and all their relatives told them it was too weird, that he’d get teased nonstop. She wanted to know if she should put his legal name (David) on the roster instead, just to avoid trouble.
I told her what I tell everyone: weird isn’t a property of the name. It’s a measure of how familiar people are with it. When I was a kid in the 90s, no one in my grade was named Mia or Noah. Everyone thought those names were weird, even made fun of them. Now they’re two of the most popular names in the country. My own name is Brenna, and I can’t tell you how many kids called it weird growing up, constantly mixed it up with Brenda. Now I see baby name lists with Brenna all the time.
What works, what I’ve learned from doing this year after year, is small concrete things that don’t take much time or effort. First, when a kid says a name is weird out loud, don’t shame them for saying it. If you just yell rudeness and move on, you don’t fix anything. The kid with the unusual name still feels like there’s something wrong with their name, and the other kid just learns to whisper the comment instead of saying it out loud where you can help. Instead, turn it into a 30-second story. If the kid with the name wants to share where it came from, let them. If they don’t, you share what you know – “Bear’s parents love hiking, and they named him after the bears they see on their trips every year” – that’s enough. Once a name has a story attached to the person, it stops being a weird sound and becomes their name.
For parents worried their kid’s name is too unusual: stop apologizing for it when you introduce them. Instead of saying “Sorry it’s so weird, we just liked it,” say “This is Bear, named for the bears we saw on the trip we had when I was pregnant.” Confidence around the name makes other people, including other kids, treat it as normal. If the name is hard to pronounce, offer a nickname only if your kid wants one. Don’t force it on them to make other people comfortable. Xochitl could go by Xochi if she wanted, but she told me she likes the full name because it was her great grandma’s, so that’s what we use.
I also tell parents that if teasing does happen, it’s not automatically proof the name was a bad choice. Teasing happens over everything – glasses, curly hair, the snack a kid brings for lunch. A name with a story kids can share gives them a simple way to push back on that teasing that doesn’t involve fighting or getting upset.
Last week at recess, I saw Jax and Xochitl building a block tower out of the big foam blocks by the playground. Jax was writing a sign for their tower, and he asked Xochitl to spell her name for him, then wrote it out in big wobbly letters. No one snickered. No one called it weird. It was just the name on the sign for their tower.
Do some names feel weird to people? Sure. Some people will always side-eye a name that’s not the one they’re used to. But the weirdness isn’t in the name, it’s in the gap between what we know and what we don’t. I still have moments where I fumble a new name, still have moments where a kid says it’s weird before I can redirect. It’s not a perfect fix, and it doesn’t stop all teasing. But most of the time, a 30-second story is all it takes to turn a “weird name” into just a name.
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