Perfect Parenting Part 2

The make-up of a name is what this chapter focus' on. Here Levit continues with his parenting ideas stating styles of names are predictors of future success and can be linked with certain groups of people. He also asks whether poor blacks tend to pick more obscure names or whether picking the names help to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. In this part he essentially questions whether or not naming your child a particularly black name will result in a lower economic status, or whether they are named according to their economic status. His research resulted in one large finding. According to Levit, applicants with caucasian names tended to get jobs more frequently than those who had generally african names. In general, he thinks that having a "black name" commonly results in acheiving lower in your lifetime.
I personally believe that this whole part is bullshit. I think that anyone could give their child any name and hes has just as good of a chance of being a success/failure as anyone else in the wolrd. However, i do believe that poor and broken-apart families tend to name their children with new or obscure names. There fore, many of the children who grow up and turn out bad in this group give obscure names a bad reputation.
The auhtor aslo analyzies how names become popular among the white communtity. In his analysis he found that well-off families tend to make odd names popular. Then, the name slowly makes it down the ladder until it reaches the lower class. I believe that this trend tends to be true. My mother works as a kindergarden teacher for a community with alot of high income families, therefore she sees many very interesting names get their introduction in her class room.