** Click here for Episode 146 **
Anon in Australia has been doing an informal survey which might be a ripe subject for a PhD thesis:
In my work as a pharmacist I dispense enormous quantities of medications for children with ADD or ADHD. “The Man” dictates that I am to keep handwritten records of each dispensing in a special book. Whilst auditing this book recently, I noticed something interesting about the Christian names of children in this book.
Compared to other children that required mundane things like antibiotics and what-not, the ones getting prescriptions for ADD medications overwhelmingly had exotic or alternatively spelled names. And no, I’m not alluding to “foreign” names. I looked at a popular baby-name website and found that while some of these Christian names have been very popular over the last ten years (most in the top 50 baby names), 20 years ago none of them were even in the top 100!
So answer me this; WTF is going on here? Is naming your baby “Jayden”, “Harley” or “Taylah” sentencing the poor child to a life of petty arson and inattentiveness at school? Will a traditional name like “Bruce” avert this life path?
Readers, strap on your snobbery-bonnets and tell Anon in the comments whether you have found sound scientific evidence corroborating this theory.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
August 27, 2010 at 3:22 pm |
If it’s any consolation, my given name is Katherine, and I was still mad as a fruitbat for about eight years.
August 26, 2010 at 11:32 am |
of course you can be kooky, Max. go nuts! just not in serious things such as scarring your child with a ridiculous name for life.
August 26, 2010 at 11:36 am |
merci helen
i was going to do some reports over lunch, but instead now plan to strip naked and run round the office singing the dambusters theme.
see you at the GMC!
August 26, 2010 at 11:37 am |
sorry- dan
confused
August 26, 2010 at 11:19 am |
Interesting question…. I need to be a bit careful, because I run an ADHD service in south london, but anon is right. There are a disproportionate number of unconventional spellings in this group. But not because the parents are young/feckless/ weak, but because they are poor.
I’ll leave it to others to pontificate on the connection, but it seems that it gives parents a feeling of control and confidence to spell their kids names how the hell they want, and poor, less educated parents need this more.
By the way, the fact that most diagnosed ADHD families are poor does not mean that it is not at least partly a biological condition, in both causation and presentation. There’s all sorts of reasons for the class correlation in diagnosis, which again I’ll leave for now.
So what happened to the old working class names? Well the upper-middle class nicked them, which is why any posh nursery sounds like a victorian scullery maid’s conference (Molly! Daisy! Ruby!)
Finally, does the fact that I called my son John mean that I can’t be kooky? No fair.
August 25, 2010 at 4:56 pm |
Just to point out in my previous comment that if it is assumed that ADHD behaviour is not biological then it is learned. That’s why I rambled on about parents’ attitudes etc.
August 25, 2010 at 4:35 pm |
This is an interesting point. There’s a school of thought that is gaining a lot of support that ADHD is not really a neurobiological condition. A lot of the studies into ADHD are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and have glaring problems with their methodologies… i.e. one study (Castellanos et al. [2002, cited in Leo & Cohen 2003]) conducted brain scans on children with ADHD and on children without ADHD and noticed that children with ADHD have smaller brains when in fact, the group with ADHD were on average two years younger – a significant amount of time considering how quickly the brain develops in children. This is of course, just one study but there are other studies on ADHD with similar methodological shortcomings…
As for the link between ADHD and new names… My personal take would be that people who go for more traditional names are generally a bit more within the normality boundaries of society… You’re not exactly kooky if you call your kid “John” and you’re a bit more likely to be a stickler for such outdated concepts such as good behaviour or, say, rules. If you instill these values in your child as they are developing they are more likely to abide by the rules that society/school/authority sets them, whereas if you are a bit more “free-spirited” (demonstrated in givign your children ‘whacky’ names) you are more likely to challenge/break the rules yourself, and teach your children to do the same. It might also be younger parents (possibly unplanned children) who give their children more modern names and maybe aren’t as good at being authoritative, leading to more misbehaving in their children. This is just my opinion though – there’s no proof for this.
I really hope this doesn’t come across as condescending to young parents, I’m sure most of them are fine examples of parents but it has to be said that there is a minority who set a bad precedent for the rest (Argh – liberal guilt, I’ll put down The Guardian now…)