Why You Always Get Your Own Kids’ Names Mixed Up

It used to drive me crazy, as a kid, when my mum would look right at me and call me by my sister’s name. And then my brother’s name. And then, finally, grappling with who was standing before her, she’d remember MY name.

Her firstborn child! You’d think she’d remember a thing like that!  Now I’m a mum, also with three children, I do it all the freaking time, calling them by each other’s names.

“Why do you do that, mum?” My own firstborn asked me recently.

“I have THREE children!” I explained to her. “I can’t be expected to remember all your names!” I was joking, of course, but I really had no other explanation other than “I’m going senile”.

My grandmother, who was my dad’s mother, did it too. She always called me by my female cousin’s name. And she had three sons whose names she was constantly mixing up. Even before she got really old.

Well, what I thought was a genetic thing is actually much more common than I realised. The problem even has a name and everything.

It’s called “misnaming” and according to research from Duke University, it follows predictable patterns.

Among people who know each other well, we often pluck the wrong name from the same relationship category. It’s not unusual for friends to call each other by another friend’s name. Family members call each other by other family members’ names (which can include the dog).

According to David Rubin, a psychology and neuroscience professor who is one of the study authors, it’s not just random that this happens.

“It’s a cognitive mistake we make, which reveals something about who we consider to be in our group,” he said.

The findings are based on analysis of five separate surveys completed by more than 1,700 respondents and were published in the journal Memory and Cognition.

As well as mixing up sibling names and daughters’ names for sons’ names, it was discovered that participants often called other members of their family by the family pet’s name – but only if the pet was a dog. Owners of other pets, including cats, didn’t make this mistake.

Where there is phonetic similarity between names, it can help to fuel mix ups, the researchers found. Names that begin or end with the same sounds such as Mitchell and Michael or Mike and Joey are more likely to be swapped.

If people shared physical similarities, it had little to no role in their names being confused. Parents often mixed up their children’s names even if they looked nothing alike, or were opposite genders.

And good news is, it isn’t just something that happens as you get older – the researchers found that there were plenty of examples of “misnaming” happening among undergraduate university students.