• Child Welfare
• Child Health Services
• Neonatology
• Paediatrics

It is unusual for the state, through its courts, to interfere with the naming of a child. The reported cases relating to children’s names are not numerous, and almost all refer to changing registered names, rather than challenging a parent’s original choice of name. Hitherto, if required, intervention in parental choice has focused on the surname, often in the context of maintaining a link between a child and their father.1 Courts recognise that given names have a less ‘concrete’ character, whereby nicknames and alternative names become adherent to the maturing child. Judges have previously speculated that ‘too much emphasis’ should not be placed on a registered forename.2 By contrast, a more recent judgement (focussing on the effect on a child of changing its forename once it is sentient) found that the principles to be applied to a proposed change of name are the same regardless of whether the change relates to a forename or a surname.3 Thus, the relevance of earlier decisions, placing more significance on the surname rather than the forename, may be diminishing. The use of forenames is near-ubiquitous; ‘…given the fact that in the 21^st century a child will predominantly use his or her forename for most purposes throughout his or her life, that forename is now every bit as important to that child, and his or her identity, as is his or her surname’.4

The latter observation was …