Family

The sweet reason why parents get their kids’ names muddled up

Adorable!

Most of us have memories of our parents getting our names muddled up with our siblings when we were kids. Or if you’re a parent, you’re likely guilty of doing the same thing with your own children.

You call out to one child, but go through their sister’s name, their brother’s name – even sometimes the husband and family pets’ names before you finally arrive at the correct one.

When you’re a kid you think it’s because your parent has failed to notice the difference between you and your siblings. And when you’re a parent you assume it’s because you’ve just got too much going on in your head.

But there’s actually a much sweeter reason than that.

New research reveals that getting your kids’ names muddled up simply shows how much you love them.

Let us explain:

According to a review in Memory and Cognition that studied the phenomenon of misnaming, it found that misnaming tends to happen with people you have an equally close relationship with.

From the 1700 participants across five studies, most of those who had called someone by the wrong name were mums, and their mix-ups included all the people they loved.

“Overall, the misnaming of familiar individuals is driven by the relationship between the misnamer, misnamed, and named,” the study states.

Phonetic similarity plays a role too – when names sound the same – but primarily it’s because of the way our brains organise information. They file it into related groups then store it away. This organisational system is known as the semantic network – in a nutshell, it keeps the names of your most loved people (like your kids) in the same place. So when you’re trying to quickly grab one of these specific names, you end going through them all.

There’s only one word for this – adorable!

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