Chapter 6.....

When I first started reading Chapter 6, I thought that it was going to expand on the subject matter of what makes a good parent. Little did I know the whole chapter was going to be about the importance of naming children. The authors first give an example of this by talking about a father who named one child Loser and one child Winner. Of course Loser turned out to be a winner in life and Winner ended up as a loser. Who truly in their right mind would ever do something like that? Even if you take away the embarrassment of growing up with the name Loser, it would be hard for Loser to get over the fact that his Dad truly thought he would be a loser. I feel the main reason Loser became a winner was because he was motivated to prove to his Dad that he would not be a loser. The book then starts talking about how Blacks come up with uncommon names on a consistent basis while White names are more common. I have always thought to myself that Blacks have such cooler names than Whites. The names are so much more creative and interesting. I never really thought about the repercussions of these unique names. The authors explain how this could affect Blacks because people make assumptions just based on other people’s names. They explained a study that was done where there were two resumes sent in with the same qualifications but one was under a “white” name and one was under a “black” name. It turned out that there were much more responses for the White person than the Black person. I personally think this is just society being ignorant. I mean how could you possibly judge someone by their name? I understand that based on statistics if someone’s name is something very uncommon the chance of them coming from a low income family is high, but there are many people with uncommon names that come from high income families too. No one controls what their name is, and for someone to judge them on what their parents decided to name them is a joke. The authors then explain the most common names regarding low income people and high income. They figure out that the most common names from high income people eventually trickle down and in ten to twenty years these are the most common names for low income people. This seems like a very interesting finding because I would of never recognized this on my own. This chapter concludes with the authors explaining that the name of person won’t affect their personality, but it probably is an indication of the parent’s prediction on how successful their child will be.