‘A month old and we still call her Poppet!’: What happens when parents can’t pick a name
24 days after her birth, Peter Andre and his wife Dr Emily MacDonagh still haven’t settled on a name for their third child, currently using the nickname “bubba”. The 51-year-old Aussie pop star (best known for his 1995 hit Mysterious Girl) says the couple have been torn between two options: Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) or Charlotte (because he’s got a soft spot for the nickname “Charlie”).
But the Andres must choose soon. In Scotland (where births must be legally registered within 21 days), Andre would already be risking a fine. We give exhausted new parents a little more admin slack in England and Wales, requiring forms to be completed and new prams wheeled into county halls within 42 days.
Those who miss the deadline risk a £200 fine and lots of additional form faff, and it seems that as a nation we’re pretty good at dotting our newborn’s Is (for Isla – the 3rd most popular UK girl’s name in 2022) and crossing our Ts (for Theodore, 22nd most popular boy’s name ahead of Thomas at 289). On average, only four to six per cent of births were registered late between 2008-2019. Restrictions during the pandemic understandably saw that number rise to 46 per cent in 2020 but settling back to 13 per cent by 2022.
But it’s wise to get it right the first time, because alterations are tedious to arrange. To change a child’s first name, you need to do that via deed poll and that requires agreement from everyone with parental responsibility, much more form filling, and a £48.32 fee.
Andre hasn’t struggled with name indecision before. He became the father of two children with his ex-partner, glamour model back in 2005 and 2007 and named them Junior Savva and Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther. His other two children with 34-year-old MacDonagh (born 2014 and 2016) are more conventionally named Millie and Theo.
But we all know that – to cadge from TS Eliot – the naming of children is a difficult matter, it isn’t just one of your holiday games.
Two parents’ family lifetimes of preference and sensitivity come into play when you choose how your precious bundle will be addressed for the rest of their life. “Pick names that mean your kids will be able to get jobs on building sites or in government,” advised one of my own friends when I first became pregnant back in 2008. “Don’t pick the name of a favourite pop star or an actor, in case they get caught doing something awful,” cautioned another.
In the end I played it safe with “James” for my 2009-born son (26th most popular in 2022) and slightly more riskily with “Pearl” (238th most popular in 2022), who was born in 2012. I’d loved the name Pearl from childhood, relishing the way its marine curls rolled out from under my Biro as I doodled it on notebooks the way other girls repeatedly wrote the names of boys they fancied. One day, I thought, I will hold my Pearl. But even my decades of planning hadn’t covered all the implications. My Pearl had been in the world for a fortnight before a nurse called out for “Mother of Pearl?” in an NHS waiting room. I realised that’s what I was and giddily high-fived an elderly woman awaiting a blood test opposite because she was the only other person who got the joke.
Other friends haven’t been so lucky, because nobody has a crystal ball. I know a woman who called her daughter “Elsa” months before the Disney film Frozen starring a character of that name became a global sensation. Another friend called her baby “Alexa” before Amazon hijacked the name for its smartspeaker, relegating the poor girl to a lifetime of karaoke requests from waggish peers.
Event planner Stephanie Wallis has premature twins born at speed to save their lives. She had always wanted a son named Tristan but didn’t have a second name. As Wallis was seriously unwell at delivery, the boys were simply tagged “Twin 1” and “Twin 2” like Dr Seuss characters. The tiny boys were quickly relocated to another hospital for emergency care where she named the second ‘Rory’. But she later found out that Tristan’s ID card had never been transferred to the second hospital, leaving him officially branded “Twin 1”.
Gender fluidity means names are challenging convention these days. A student midwife told me she’d witnessed the delivery of a baby boy named ‘Jennifer’, while another contact tells me her husband refused to let her call their daughter ‘Stevie’ because he felt it was a boys’ name: “Who hasn’t heard of Stevie Nicks?” she shrugs.
As a global celebrity, Andre must also be alert to international reactions. Lea Henry – 28-year-old chair of CocoRio creative nannies – says that her family has strong links to France, Germany, Finland and England, “so we needed names that sounded decent in all these languages. We struggled throughout pregnancy, had lots of lists but there was always something that didn’t sound good in one of our languages or meant something rude in another. I really liked the name ‘Rumi’ – after the poet – for our daughter, but that means “ugly” in Finland and my husband’s mother is Finnish.”
At least in the UK, most options are open to the Andres. In Portugal (which has an 83-page list of approved names) he wouldn’t be allowed to call his daughter Charlotte (British names like William, Emily, Thomas, Michael and Catherine are also forbidden there, although local variations Caterina and Tomas are allowed). Iceland has a specific naming committee who oversee the “introduction of new given names into the culture of Iceland”.
In France in 2018, a couple was prevented from calling their daughter “Liam” because of the risk of gender confusion, while Germany – said to have the strictest rules on naming – has sensibly banned names such as Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. In the UK, it seems very little is off limits but the Registering Officer is likely to refuse names that are fraudulent, contain numbers, misleading titles, are impossible to pronounce or include obscenities. But otherwise, the world’s naming pool is the oyster for Andre’s mysterious girl.
