Fun Friday Question (on Monday!): Did Mom name the girls and Dad the boys?

sanctanomina Fun Friday Question, Naming nitty gritty

I meant to post this last Friday and forgot, and I’ll be off the blog this coming Friday in observance of Good Friday, and I don’t have a consultation to post today, so Fun Friday Question on a Monday it is!

In last week’s consultation, we read about how Mom would be choosing the baby’s name if they have a girl, while Dad would be choosing if they have a boy. I’ve known of other families who have done this, and I’ve always been intrigued by it. So my question is a simple one: Did you do this in your family? Did your parents? Do you know of others who have done so? Is it usually a fairly peaceful process in your experience/observance, or do you know of situations where the parent who didn’t get to choose really hates the name the other parent chose? Do you have any examples of extreme style mismatches in a family because of this practice? (You know I love a well-matched bunch of sibling names, but I actually also really love to see siblings with an eclectic bunch of names!)

I hope your Holy Week has started well!

My book, Catholic Baby Names for Girls and Boys: Over 250 Ways to Honor Our Lady (Marian Press, 2018), is available to order from ShopMercy.org and Amazon — perfect for expectant parents, name enthusiasts, and lovers of Our Lady!

9 thoughts on “Fun Friday Question (on Monday!): Did Mom name the girls and Dad the boys?”

  1. Hubs said he got to name our 6th child because I chose the 5th child’s name. (I wanted our third son to be named after our church’s patron saint: St.John the Baptist and after him: David) He finally agreed so we have a John David who is a true “mini me” of my husband.
    He wanted to name our third daughter after his grandmother. Being the traditionalist that I am, I said, “do it!” until I realized her name was Ula Luella. I vetoed the first name reminding him that baby need a Catholic name, but quickly agreed to the Luella thinking we would use “Ella” as a NN. We ended up naming her Luella Marie and she goes by Lulu.
    The first 5 children have very “basic, traditional, Catholic” names (Anna, Joseph, Maggie, Anthony, and JD) then we have a Luella and a Tobias (nn Toby). 😊

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  2. I know a couple who are actually planning on the opposite! They’ve decided that Mom will name the first boy and Dad the first girl!

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    • Haha that’s exactly my case! Not willing to compromise on the boy’s name, so he got to pick the girl’s name.

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  3. It did happen in my family, but a bit accidentally, as far as I’m aware, it wasn’t anything planned or intended at all, it was more like both of my parents were thinking about names for me and my siblings, but in the end it was Mum who came up with names for me and my sister, and Dad came up with the name for my brother. I know that Mum struggled with the naming process very much with both me and my sister – with my sister I was actually able to witness it. – We had a name that we had picked for her collectively as a family at the beginning of the pregnancy – Helena – and we were always referring to her this way, but then when she was actually born Mum suddenly changed her mind and decided she doesn’t want her to be a Helena, but had no other constructive ideas for a long time, until finally, a little before a month after her birth, she spontaneously came up with the name Zofia. It was similar with me, although the process wasn’t as long and hectic.
    It’s usually mums who are better at picking names and more conscious about what they like and don’t like, but I guess in our family it was slightly different. When I try to ask my Dad these days about names that he likes or that he would use if he had more children, he has no idea, but when he had to pick a name for his actual son, it was an instant and very confident decision, and, in my personal opinion, a very good one. I think my brother’s name is most original of us all and I like it the most, and while my birth name (which I legally changed later on) was a classic and has always been more or less popular, and the name of my sister is ragingly common in her generation, my brother’s name is not that common at all among his peers, yet all our names match quite well because they’re all somewhere on the classic name spectrum.

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  4. I know a family where the mother is French (from France) and the father has deep Irish heritage. In their family of nine children, the boys have Irish names and the girls have French names! You have Pauline, Florie Ann, Faustine, Liam, Domitille, Emeline, Fintan, Thomas, and Callaghan – definitely mismatched but a ton of fun!

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  5. My grand-parents agreed to do this – but the opposite way (my grandfather would name the girls, and grandmother the boys) but they ended up having six girls ! V unfair for grandma though she took it in her stride.

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