Psychological Effects of Names on the Child's Behaviour

Abstract

There is no doubt about the fact that naming is an integral part of all cultures of the world. There is no human being without a name. This implies that the idea of giving names is a universal phenomenon. It is not only man that has names, animals, birds and indeed everything that exists on earth has names given to them. Such names were given for identification and for many other reasons as we shall see later in this work. This paper sought to examine the roles a person's name play on his or her character especially in the Yoruba belief system, to examines the power in names that modifies the person's behaviour or character- The paper stresses the need to jealously guard the name one would give a child because the Yoruba for example, believe that names have serious positive or negative effects on the child's behaviour. Hence, the saying Oruko omo nii ro omo”, or “oruko, omo ni ijanu omo”. meaning "the child's name bears on the child" or "the child's name caution's him or her". Therefore, the Yoruba as a race cherish names and see it -as a treasure that should not be defaced or thrown away. The paper than to bear names just for religious reasons even if the names have no cultural origin. To achieve our research objectives, we used the descriptive research methodology whereby samples of Yoruba names are thoroughly x-rayed in order to understand the origin and root meaning of the names.