Will You Choose A Gender Neutral Name?

It’s the biggest trend of 2018 so far…

- Hattie Garlick

What do Cheryl, Beyoncé and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg all have in common? No, not wardrobes bigger than all our bedrooms combined: they have all recently given their babies gender-neutral names. And little Bear, Rumi and August are far from unique. A roundup of last year’s most popular baby names reveals that gender-neutral ones are more popular than ever. “There has been a revolution in naming,” says Laura Wattenberg, who has spent the last decade studying the names we choose to give our children and what those trends tell us. “And the rise of the unisex name tells us a huge amount about the futures that 21st-century parents are aspiring to for their children.”

So where does today’s sudden rise in gender-neutral names have its roots? You might assume it was in the 1960s that gender-neutral names first rose to prominence, introducing hippy names such as Rain and Sunshine. Not so, says Laura: “A lot of the hippy names that emerged in the 1960s came about through adults changing their own names. The vast majority of babies being born were still being given very conventional, gendered names.” Parents were only prepared to break the mould when it came to nicknames: “We’ve always been comfortable with nicknames that boys and girls can share,’ says Laura, ‘such as Chris.”