Woman Left Nursing to Be Professional Baby Namer: Inside Her Consult (Exclusive)

• Colleen Slagen — virally known as Naming Bebe on social media — left her job as a nurse practitioner in 2022 to pursue her lifelong passion: baby names.
• The mom of three is an expert on naming statistics and emerging moniker trends. She takes on expecting parents as clients for $300 to $400 consultations before offering her suggestions.
• Slagen recently penned her expertise to paper for her new book, Naming Bebe: An Interactive Guide to Choosing the Baby Name You Love, which is set to release on June 10.

Choosing a baby name isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. Parents are tasked with giving their children the first piece of an identity, and there are often several factors to consider — family traditions, a desire for a sibling moniker for compatibility or a favorite letter to lead.

Then, with all of that in mind, parents might encounter certain dilemmas. Does that sound right with our last name? Will the baby have a cute nickname? Is there a different spelling we should use? Is that something people can easily pronounce?

Is Elsa too Frozen? Can we really go with Karen in this social climate? And how can I possibly get my partner to agree with me on any of my favorite names?

Suddenly, stress clouds the process. But there’s no need to panic. Instead of running up and down an ever-growing list of names, defer to an expert. Enter Colleen Slagen, a professional baby name consultant who has spent her whole life consumed by the name game.

“Everywhere I look in my house — on a coupon, on my kid’s calendar, on a scrap piece of paper — there’s just names everywhere,” Slagen tells PEOPLE exclusively. “On my computer, I just have all these sticky notes that are just name lists. Next to me, I have a notebook full of name lists, I’m always brainstorming names.”

Starting from a young age, she peeled through baby name books and kept journals where she jotted down her favorites. When her friends started having kids, she did some unofficial consultations, and she always joked about taking her passions to the professional stage. However, the idea didn’t take full form until 2022, when she took maternity leave from her job as a nurse practitioner.

At first she launched a website and posted it to local mom groups on Facebook. In that first year, she only took on a few clients, but she also started posting about it on TikTok and Instagram. It wasn’t long before her videos went viral that she decided to quit her nursing job in favor of becoming a full-time advisor to parents in search of the perfect name.

“It was sort of like I met the moment. It was right place, right time. Baby naming was starting to have a moment,” Slagen reflects. “Pretty quickly, that just increased my business a ton.”

In addition to launching her professional consulting service, she also authored her book Naming Bebe: An Interactive Guide to Choosing the Baby Name You Love, which is currently available for pre-order ahead of its release on June 10.

Slagen’s work is usually conducted on a Zoom call with the family, though she offers a “bite-sized” option if parents just want her to weigh in on a list of already established options. She calls this shorter version “Name 911,” and her briefer input is priced at $50.

The full intensive — which costs around $300 to $400 — is a deep dive into the family’s general notion of what they’re looking for, their current picks and what criteria they’re working with. After the call, Slagen sends her clients a PDF of her name ideas for them, complete with explanations of why she thinks those are good fits, plus the popular ranking for each one.

“I feature a bunch of names, and then they get a list of raw names I also think are worth considering,” she notes.

Parents usually come to Slagen with a few common issues. “A big one is cohesion with the siblings. Another big one is popularity,” says the Boston-based expert. “A lot of people will be like, ‘We love this name, but it’s feeling popular, it’s feeling trendy.'”

Trendiness can be contextualized and quantified with data. Once they’ve looked at the numbers of babies given one certain name, Slagen will press a little harder into the issue.

“Well, how popular is it? How does that compare to other names on your list, and what does that really mean? What do you care about? Do you want your kid to be the only one with that name in the class?” she offers as examples of ways she might address concerns.

Slagen’s natural, long-held interest in naming patterns has paid off, since it’s now imperative to her business that she keep her finger on the pulse. She’s constantly keeping up with the ebbs and flows of name trends and what impacts them.

Certain names can skyrocket in popularity amid culture shifts and news bumps, while others will drop off due to overuse, then circle back decades later. Right now, she’s seeing the decline of babies dubbed with what she calls “older Gen Z names,” those that were big in the early 2000s.

“Think like Peyton and Reagan and people getting creative with those spellings, like P-E-Y-T-Y-N, those are starting to fall from grace,” says the mom of three. “And then Baby Boomer names — so Karen, Linda, Janet — they’re not doing so hot.”

Millennial names like Courtney, Jennifer, Stephanie, and Kay — as well as Slagen’s own Colleen, she admits — are also on the decline, but retro isn’t out altogether.

The “vintage names” of earlier generations are swinging into use, adds Slagen, pointing to examples like like Evelyn, Hazel and Violet for girls and Harvey, Archie and Oscar for boys.

“A lot of your grandparents’ names are starting to come back,” says Slagen. “When I was a nurse, I had this patient named June, and one time I was like, ‘Did you know your name is back?’ And she couldn’t believe it.”

Beyond more common client queries about trends and popularity, people frequently approach the naming consultant with more random “holdups” and questions with less straightforward answers. Slagen recalls a time when someone reached out to say they named their puppy something “very similar” to the moniker they wanted to give their future daughter. Think: the dog is called Lila, and they were thinking Lola for a baby girl.

Slagen’s advice? Change the dog’s name. “I feel like most people would be like, ‘Oh, it’s not that big a deal. Who knows what will happen?'” she adds. “But I’ve had so many people say, ‘We wish we hadn’t used this name on our dog.’ So it’s just a dog, change the name.”

Most of the time, families are pleased with the PDF Slagen sends after a meeting. Early on in her professional name-devising career, she had a person reject all of her ideas, but back then, it was all conducted over email. Slagen would give her clients a questionnaire to fill out, and in that one ill-fated case, she wished that person had answered in more detail. They redid the evaluation, and Slagen returned with a brand new list of names.

She keeps an open dialogue with her clients, letting them marinate over options and respond later if needed. She extends that line of communication even after the baby arrives and the birth certificate is finalized, and in some cases, Slagen’s help is still needed even then. She says baby name regret is actually quite common.

“It’s hard to tease out postpartum hormones. Are you going to come around to it? Is any name going to satisfy you?” she tells PEOPLE. “Some people come to me and they’re like, ‘100%, we know this is the wrong name. We want to change it.’ And then it’s like, ‘Great, let’s chat through what would be a good option to change it to.’ For a lot of people, they’re just trying to make a decision and it’s eating at them.”

She’s assisted with name changes for 4-week-olds, but more recently, she’s met with people who want to make the change one year after the baby’s arrival. Regardless, the first step is to evaluate why the parents feel that regret.

“Some people are like, ‘I was too tired. I gave into my partner’s favorite choice,'” Slagen says. “Some people are like, ‘This was the name we liked all along, and then we used it and we said it out loud and we were like, Oh my God, we hate how this sounds.”

While Slagen is completely willing to take on those cases, she admits she doesn’t often feel totally fit for the job of walking parents through such feelings. “I always feel like a therapist would be better than me,” she notes.

To avoid such situations, Slagen has key pieces of advice for expecting parents in search of the perfect baby name. One of her main suggestions is that families avoid overanalyzing during the process and figure out their main priorities ahead of time.

“There’s so many little things we get caught up on. When you’re thinking about the same thing over and over for nine months, you can start to second-guess. Try not to overthink the little things, like how it sounds with your last name,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Personally, the only thing Slagen herself wouldn’t do as both a mom of three and a naming expert is give siblings names that sound very similar. “I’m very anti-matchy-matchy,” she says, referencing an example like the Duggar brothers Jeremiah and Jedidiah. “Everybody needs their own name.”

In the effort to avoid any lovers’ quarrels down the line, Slagen thinks couples should find out if their name ideas are compatible early on — in fact, it’s something they should discuss as they navigate their own compatibility.

“Talk about names on the first date, just to make sure he or she has good style,” she adds. “That is such a common problem, my partner and I cannot agree on a baby name.”

Should partners run into that type of disagreement, Slagen tells PEOPLE it’s better to “make it fun” as you put up a fair fight for your favorite name.

“I think a lot of times I feel like women end up compromising. They like their partner’s name enough to use it, but I think you can keep searching and try to find a name that you both love just as much,” she says. “If you are having trouble getting your partner to agree on a name, make a PowerPoint and try and get them on board with it. Never give up on a name. Your partner can always come around to it.”