Mom Names Get Younger
Today’s Mom Names might be familiar to you as the names of the friends who came to your first sleepover or your roommates in college: forever young. But many of the top girl names of the 1980s and 90s, once so fresh and cool, have become the new Mom Names of today.
It stands to reason that many 80s and 90s names have crossed over into mom territory: Girls born in those decades are now 20 to 40, the prime age for motherhood.
Of course, not every name of a twenty-or-thirty-something female automatically becomes a Mom Name. What does?
To qualify as a Mom Name, the name has to be emblematic of those late decades of the 1900s but to have since faded from popularity. Sure, there are definitely still babies named Ashley and Jessica, but those names are more likely to suggest a mom than a tiny child.
Some of the girls’ names popular at the end of the last century are too classic to be typified as Mom Names. Sarah and Elizabeth, for instance, defy a connection to any one moment in time.
Other names widely used in the 80s and 90s were already past their peak and so are really more Grandma Names than Mom Names: Donna, for instance, or Debra or, yes, Karen.
And that’s the reason you may not want to give one of the new Mom Names to a baby. As appealing as many of them are in so many way, Mom Names belong to the last generation, not the next one.
Here, what we see as the new Mom Names:
- Alex
- Alexis
- Alicia
- Allison
- Alyssa
- Amanda
- Amber
- Amy
- Angela
- Ashley
- Autumn
- Brandi
- Breanna
- Brenda
- Briana
- Brittany
- Carly
- Chelsea
- Cheryl
- Cheyenne
- Christie
- Christine
- Colleen
- Courtney
- Crystal
- Cynthia
- Danielle
- Dawn
- Denise
- Devin
- Erica
- Erin
- Haley
- Heather
- Jamie
- Jasmine
- Jenna
- Jennifer
- Jessica
- Jessie
- Jodi
- Jordan
- Julie
- Kaitlyn
- Kayla
- Kayley
- Kelly
- Kelsey
- Kendra
- Kimberly
- Krista
- Kylie
- Lauren
- Lindsay
- Lisa
- Lori
- Mallory
- Megan
- Meghan
- Melanie
- Melissa
- Michaela
- Michelle
- Monica
- Morgan
- Nicole
- Patricia
- Raven
- Rebecca
- Renee
- Samantha
- Sandra
- Shannon
- Sharon
- Shelby
- Sherry
- Sierra
- Stacy
- Stephanie
- Tammy
- Tara
- Teresa
- Tiffany
- Tina
- Tracy
- Wendy
- Whitney
Some background on the top girls’ names of the 1980s and 1990s, along with data on which names reached their highest points in the years when most of today’s new moms were born.