Baby Middle Name

There is quite certainly no legal requirement that a baby be given a middle name, and it is within parents’ rights to have their baby go without one for any reason, or even no reason at all. But there are a few things to consider if your child is going to grow up with solely a first name and surname.

A middle name will help differentiate your child from others with similar names. There’s a reason why police and the news media report that “Robert Lewis McDonald is suspected in the robbery.” It helps keep the heat off the law-abiding Robert McDonalds out there. This issue may become even more important in this era of identity theft.

Having a middle name is usually most in line with traditional governmental and other methods of record keeping. A middle name or initial would appear on passports, credit cards and other bureaucratic forms. People without middle names are used to seeing “NMI” (no middle initial) where the middle name would go on official forms. Some computer systems offer no other option. When I was in college I worked in the university library, and at first I actually thought several patrons shared the middle name of “Nmi.” Doh! (Incidentally, another patron had only one name, so his first name on the computer had to be “Mr.”)
While doctors and lawyers and some other professionals routinely use a middle initial, there’s no reason why everyone can’t enjoy the variety of adding a distinctive middle initial to their signature, business cards and school reports. Remember that childhood stage where you wrote your name all over your notebook a bunch of different ways?

Another common reason for giving your baby is middle name is as a “safety” to fall back on if he or she doesn’t like the first name, or even if something happens in popular culture to make the given name unpalatable. Jeanine Cox, author of The Perfect Name, writes: “Consider the middle name your ‘insurance’—a name your child can default to—use with her first name to achieve a desired effect.”
Perhaps most significantly, a middle name gives your child’s full name a little extra flair. And, given the limited number of opportunities you have to bestow names upon other human beings, why not take advantage of it? Heck, my cat has a middle name.