The notoriety of the first family seems to have had an impact on the naming choices of American parents. Without touching on the politics, from the plot below, it would seem that by the end of 2017 roughly 430 young women owe their names to a presidential campaign and subsequent victory (source). Also, changes in the popularity of the relatively uncommon names, Ivanka, Melania, and Barron can be anecdotally tied to life events of their putative namesakes.
It’s worth stressing that these are comparisons are anecdotal. I can’t be certain that a new jewelry line actually caused an increase in popularity of the name Ivanka. Similarly, it’s worth noting these are exceedingly small numbers – on the order of 100s. This is tiny in comparison to the popularity of the name Logan that exceeded 10, 000 in 2017 and minuscule in comparison to the total number of births in the country which approaches 4 million.
Finally, I chose to use the absolute number of births instead of the fraction of children given the name each year. On this scale I felt that absolute numbers are more intuitive. Moreover, I thought this was reasonable as the number of total births in the country was relatively constant during the period. So we can safely say that the changes in the number of children with the name are not a result of changes in the total number of children born in a given year.
Sources:
- Baby Names, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
- Melania and Barrron Biographical Information, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
- Ivanka Jewelry Line Debut, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/red-carpet-dresses/a207/ivanka-trump-diamonds-1007/
