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THE QUESTION

My daughter is two months from being born, and my partner and I, after much careful discussion, have found a name for her that we love. It's a challenging and unusual one, but we don't find it outlandish.

My mother originally said she liked it. But after asking some friends and colleagues, and getting mostly negative feedback, she said she wants me to change my mind and seems to take it personally that I don't want to.

My father said that he hopes I'm joking and that the "poor kid" would likely change it as soon as she could; that it is more suitable for a "portly middle-aged collie."

I feel defensive and a little torn. Partly defiant, but partly wondering if they're right and maybe my judgment is off. The kid isn't even born and already I feel like a bad mother. How should I handle my parents - and my sister, who also hates the name?

THE ANSWER

I've always thought naming a kid is underrated as one of the tougher aspects of the roll-up to having a baby.

You're all tangled up in ultrasounds, amnios, doctor/midwife appointments, anxiety over the health of the mother and the baby, unsolicited bump touching and so on.

But naming a kid is forever and can have far-reaching consequences.

I know a guy in his 40s who is still mad at his parents for the name he was "saddled" with.

My wife's rule of thumb for a name is: It should be something you feel comfortable screaming at the top of your lungs across a crowded playground (because you wind up having to do that a lot).

Mine is: It should be something that sounds natural and flows mellifluously after the words "Supreme Court Justice."

Pam and I battled over the name of our third kid. After giving our first two relatively safe, boring names (Nicholas and Jonathan James, a.k.a. J.J.), she got a wild hair and wanted to call our third kid Phineas.

I think she pictured herself at the playground, wind ruffling her hair, calling "Finn! Finn!"

But I foresaw him growing up angry and nasty, maybe becoming a rapper and calling himself something like PH Negative: "My parents called me Phineas/ Go ahead and laugh/ They thought it was ingenious/ It cut my social life in half."

We wound up naming him Adam.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as big a fan of unusual names as the next guy. And these days, kids, especially celebrity kids, all have crazy names like Apple and Brooklyn. (Ali G, responding to the popularly held belief that David Beckham and Posh Spice named their son Brooklyn because he was conceived there, said, to paraphrase: Then me and me Julie should name our child KFC Bathroom in Langley Village.)

Your kid will probably wind up in a class with five Maddoxes, two Xanadus and maybe a Klute or a Quint, LeJohnny or Shumar.

Vis-à-vis your parents and their friends and your sister, well, on the one hand you should bear in mind the old saying: "If five people tell you you're drunk, maybe you should lie down."

Since it seems unanimous, listen carefully and consider their opinion seriously (as indeed it appears you have).

But don't let them boss you around. If, as you say, this is a name you and your partner "love," you should tell your relatives to keep their pointy proboscises out of your parenting.

Letting them horn in on the baby-naming is setting a bad precedent. If you let your parents boss you around before your kid is even born, you could create a pair of monsters, advising you on everything from your child's diet to sleeping habits to complexion.

And what you really want to turn your parents into is not monsters, but babysitters.

Trust me on this one. Like a judo master, use their bossy, parenting-by-proxy momentum to throw them into the ring.

After the kid is born: "Oh, Dad, you sure have some interesting observations about how young Xanadu should eat only organic baby food. Why don't you grab some and bring it over? Thanks, that'd be a great help! And, hey, since you'll be here anyway, why don't you try feeding it to him and looking after him while his father and I head out to the movies?"

When it comes to parenting, opinions are like stinking, steaming, full diapers: There's no shortage of them, and no one wants to change them.

But if your parents are willing to pitch in and help out, they've earned the right to express their opinions - into your tape recorder, which you can promise them you'll replay as soon as you get back from the movie.

David Eddie is a screenwriter and the author of Chump Change and Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad.

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