The Most Popular Baby Names in Texas, or What Not to Name Your Children For The Next 5-10 Years

My mother, bless her, didn’t know the sort of inconveniences she was saddling me with when she named me. When she was growing up, in the 1960s, there were relatively few children named “Jason” to be found. She didn’t know that, in the 1970s, when I was born, “Jason” would see a sudden surge in popularity, to the point where it was the third-most popular name for newborn boys. She didn’t know. She just liked the name.

And so, there was I was, the first day of kindergarten with two other boys named Jason in my class. My teacher informed me that I would be known as “Jason H.” And so I remained, saddled with having to use that additional initial, throughout elementary school. As I got older, attending a larger junior high and high school, it only got worse. There was a mix-up in a Little League baseball draft because there was another boy in my town, swear to God, who was named “Jason Head.”  A coach had made an incorrect assumption that there’d been a typo on the list of players, and one of us (OK, me) ended up being dropped from the list and went undrafted.

All of this is a preface to saying to you expectant parents out there: Don’t do this to your children. Below is a list of the 10 most popular baby names in Texas for 2011.

Avoid any name that ranks currently in the top 10, at least. Maybe even the top 20.  Otherwise your child will always suspect you’re lying when you tell him he’s special:

(The number on the right is the number of children registered with Social Security with that name in the state for the year.)