The morally gray ethics of giving your kid a weird name
Commentary on family vlogging
The obsession with aesthetics that social media has bestowed upon us has infiltrated all corners of life: within the last decade, even baby names. New parents pore through ancient Greek mythology or the solar system to discover the perfect and most unique name for their offspring that will preordain their children as future it-girls (or it-boys). What name will look the coolest in the Insta bio, or best match their future child’s aesthetic?
Influencers, those typically most preoccupied with aesthetics, have been at the forefront of giving their kids unconventional names. The most timely example is model and TikTok influencer Nara Smith, who has gained millions of followers for her impressive culinary skills, making all her food, even Cheez-its, from scratch. Smith is the center of current discourse involving the rise of the Trad-wife phenomenon, but that aspect of her online presence is irrelevant to me today.
Rather, I want to focus on the names of her three kids: Rumble Honey, Slim Easy, and Whimsy Lou. She has spoken about these out-there names on her TikTok and even has provided other names she and her husband loved but did not use, all of which have that same unique flair. Bow, Tink, Lemon, Halo, Dew, Mercer, Flick… these are all potential baby names for baby Smith (not the spunky animal sidekick in a Disney movie).
Smith is a dime a dozen of this trend. TikTok creator @emdoodlesandstuff has made a career predicting influencer baby names based on their content and overall aesthetics. For example, in a video about creator Hannah’s (@ballerinafarm) upcoming baby girl, Em compiled a list including Agnes, Ethel, Dorcas, and Ruth based on the mother’s agricultural aesthetic and her other children’s names that give the vibes of “stoic pioneer” who “would endure the pain and hardship of crossing the plains.” God I love the creativity.
Anywho, the trend of unconventional names is spreading beyond just influencers. Based on the US Social Security website, some of the most increasingly popular names include Izael, Chozen, Eiden, and Cassian for boys and Kaeli, Alitzel, Emryn, and Adhara for girls. And listen, regardless of how unconventional the names are, these names are beautiful and I do not want to hate on anyone for breaking convention. In fact, please, break more societal norms.
However, the unique names trend is just a symptom of a larger progression, one that may be more malignant to our culture. That is, family vlogging and the widespread use of children for monetized social media content. Family vloggers are parents who produce social media content by recording the daily life of their family, often with young children. Some of the most popular vloggers create long-form content on YouTube, including channels such as The Ace Family, The Tannerites, and The Labrant Fam. These channels showcase their lives in excruciating detail, and viewers establish connections with the children, the parents, and the whole family dynamic.
This form of entertainment has never been for me, but I assume people gravitate toward it because entertainment imitates life, and there is nothing more quintessentially human than a family dynamic. Kids are adorable and funny, often making light-hearted, silly, and sweet videos. Also, other parents watching family vlogs can learn parenting tips from the influencers filming. While the phenomenon is called family vlogging (meaning video blogs), these types of influencers exist on all platforms, and they are rampant on Instagram and TikTok.
Although this type of influencing seems very wholesome, many have spoken up about numerous ways this practice is entirely unethical. For one, the children are minors and cannot consent to be filmed, posted online, and monetized. Almost every moment of the children’s lives are posted, even the embarrassing moments that they would rather keep private, as long as it makes for good content. If their parents want them on camera, the kids have to perform.
Often, viewers pick up on these sad undercurrents. For instance, many followers of The Labrant Fam noticed that the eldest daughter Everleigh did not want to be on camera in certain videos, and she was unenthused when her mother told their followers that Everleigh would be homeschooled to help take care of her younger siblings. Unlike laws that protect child actors, there are no laws ensuring that these kids get breaks, or that they get some money for their work put aside, untouched until they are old enough to access it. The parents pocket all of the profits from brand deals and AdSense at the expense of their children’s mental health.
There are even darker aspects to the whole family vlogging business. Many of these accounts’ followers are old men who could have nefarious motivations. They may not be entertained by the children's dances or antics for the cuteness of it all, but rather by something more predatory. Many TikTok users have called out certain influencers for dressing their children inappropriately or making them do certain actions in videos that could invite unwanted attention, merely for more views, money, and popularity.
All of this exploitation can, and often does, veer into straight-up child abuse. Recently, a family vlogger named Ruby Franke was convicted of four felony counts of second-degree aggravated child abuse. She had a popular YouTube channel called 8Passengers where she showcased her family, including her husband and six children. Before she was criminally charged this year, viewers had been suspecting abuse occurring behind the scenes since 2020.
Franke had posted about her harsh discipline techniques, such as punishing her son’s prank on his brother by taking away his bedroom for seven months, making him sleep on a bean-bag chair. Another common form of her children’s punishment was withholding food. These horrible techniques were just the tip of the iceberg – what she felt safe to post online. The deeper abuse was discovered when her twelve-year-old son escaped from Franke’s business partner’s house, malnourished and wounded, asking a neighbor for food and water.
One might wonder why I started off this piece with whimsical baby names, only to turn down this darker road. After all, as Shakespeare would say, what’s in a name? Why does that even matter compared to the more horrific aspects of family-oriented social media content?
As much as social media trolls claim that giving a child a weird name is akin to child abuse, it is most certainly not. However, the weird-nameification of young children stems from the toxic combination of minors and social media induced narcissism. The constant need to maintain a perfect illustration of your life on social media, which is magnified x100 for influencers, leads children to be used as props, another piece of one’s own self image.
An influencer tries to embody the “granola” aesthetic online, so then they name their kid Mountain to fit the vibe that they curated for themself. Funky names are a manifestation of people trying to keep up with the Joneses, always pushing extremes to maintain popularity and status.
Moreover, an influencer posting their child and giving it a controversial name is just another way for a child to be put on the Internet and ridiculed against their will. We do not consent to the names we have, and young children also cannot consent to being exposed to millions of people who might have something mean to say about their name.
And again, using an unconventional name is not wrong at all. It is just interesting how the rise of that trend coincides with the increasingly most dominating aspect of our lives – social media. Slim Easy will grow up to be fine in the real world with his name, but maybe the embarrassment of having millions of TikTok users utilizing his name as a punchline will be a harder trauma to overcome.
Parents have already begun to reckon with the consequences of blasting their children online, with many influencers blurring their children’s faces to protect their privacy. I hope this practice continues, and either family channels diminish naturally or laws catch up to social media’s ever-changing influencer climate. And if you have a unique name, good for you. I can speak from experience as an Olivia, you will likely never have three other kids in your class with the same name!