Do Kids Actually Have ‘Weird’ Names? A Teacher Explains What We’re Really Missing
The first day of third grade smells like new crayons and lemon disinfectant, and I’m halfway through roll call when I hear it. A mom lingering by the door to drop off her older kid leans over and whispers, loud enough for me to catch, “What kind of name is that? That’s so weird.” I’d just called Ziv’s name, and the 8-year-old in dinosaur rain boots (he wears them even when it’s 80 degrees out) had already shot his hand in the air, grinning. I paused for half a second, marked his name present, and kept going, but the line stuck with me. I’ve been teaching elementary school for 12 years, and I hear some version of that line at least once every first week of school.
When I started teaching, the most unusual name in my class was Aurora, and parents would side-eye it. Now Aurora’s in the top 20 baby names nationally. Last year, I had three Kai’s in one class, and the office misspelled all of their names as “Kay” for the first month of school, until I printed out new name tags and taped them to every desk. People called Kai weird once, now it’s mainstream. The whole idea of a “weird name” is really just a name that hasn’t made its way into your personal bubble yet.
A week into the school year, we do our annual “All About Me” name project. Kids draw a picture of what their name means, or why their parents picked it, and share it with the class. Ziv got up first, holding his crumpled drawing of a big yellow sun. “My name means light in Hebrew,” he said, tapping the sun with his crayon. “My grandma was named Ziva, and she lived in a really bad place a long time ago, and she said the light was the thing that kept her going. My parents named me Ziv after her, because we moved here for new light.” By the end of his talk, half the kids were nodding, and one boy raised his hand to ask if he could change his name to Ziv too because it sounded cool. None of them thought it was weird.
That’s the thing no one talks about when we’re calling kids’ names weird. Kids don’t think names are weird until adults tell them to. All a kid sees is another kid’s name. It’s different, so it’s interesting, end of story. “Weird” is just the label we slap on anything that’s not familiar to us. Half the time, the names we write off as weird, made-up celebrity baby names are actually rooted in family, culture, or a story that matters more than how common it is. The other half are names that were weird to our parents’ generation too, until they weren’t.
I’ve had a lot of parents ask me what to do, both if their kid is the one with the “weird” name and if their kid is teasing someone else. It doesn’t take big gestures, just small concrete things. If you’re meeting a new kid with a name you don’t recognize, don’t mumble through it or make a self-deprecating joke about how hard it is. Just stop and ask: “Can you remind me how to say your name? I want to get it right.” I did that with Nneka, a student I had 10 years ago, after I messed it up the first day. She wrote the phonetic spelling on a sticky note for my roll sheet, and she still mentions it when she comes back to visit – says the last teacher just called her “Neenee” the whole year because she couldn’t be bothered to learn. Getting the name right is the first thing you do to make a kid feel like they belong, and it takes 10 seconds.
If your kid comes home talking about how “weird” another kid’s name is, don’t just say “that’s rude, don’t say that.” Ask them: “I wonder why their parents picked that name. Do you want to ask them tomorrow, or look it up together right now?” When two of my students were snickering about Onyx’s name back in September, I asked Onyx if he wanted to share his story. He told us his dad collects rocks, and found a huge black onyx gemstone the day he was born, so that’s what they named him. By the end of the week, half the class brought in their own rocks from their backyard for show and tell. No one thought it was weird after that.
For parents picking out baby names who are worried their favorite name is too weird, skip the online message boards where people argue about which names are too out there. Just ask yourself two simple questions. First, can an 8-year-old learn to spell it and say it without getting frustrated every time they have to write it on a worksheet? Second, do you love it enough that it’ll still fit when your kid is 40, not just a cute newborn? If the answer to both is yes, that’s all that matters. I have a friend who named her daughter Mazarine after the blue oil paint, and people still tell her it’s weird. Mazarine’s 10 now, and she loves that no one else in her class has her name, and she can tell people the story about the color. That’s a good thing, not a weird thing.
A month after that first day, I saw that mom who whispered about Ziv at parent-teacher conferences. She brought it up unprompted, twisting her coffee cup in her lap, and said she felt bad about it afterward. She grew up in a tiny town in Iowa where everyone was named Mike or Sarah, and she just wasn’t used to anything different. I told her Ziv’s story about his grandma, and she nodded, and said that makes way more sense than just thinking it’s some random weird name.
Last week, Ziv brought in a framed photo of his grandma to put on our classroom family wall. After show and tell, one of the other kids asked him if he ever gets mad when people mess up his name or call it weird. Ziv leaned back against the rug, chewed on a piece of his apple slice, and shrugged. “Nah,” he said. “It’s my name. I just tell ‘em how to say it again. That’s it.” Some people will still think it’s weird, I guess. But that’s their thing, not his.
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