Sorry, Michaels and Jessicas: your reign at the top of the baby names list is over. The people having the most kids in this country, Millennials, are giving their babies stranger and stranger names.
In a time when actual people are naming their children Legendary and Sadman and Lux (after the Instagram filter), that should perhaps come as no surprise. But in the new study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers wanted to figure out if the trend was more than anecdotal.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book Generation Me, and research assistant Lauren Dawson analyzed the first names of 358 million babies in a U.S. Social Security Administration database. By doing so, they saw that parents were increasingly shying away from typical names.
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