Josh and Aubree Jones Named Their Baby Disney (And I Get It)

Dear past Tom

You're currently sitting on the bathroom floor at 3:14 AM, using a cold, damp flannel to wipe what you fervently hope is pureed parsnip off your left shoulder. Beatrice (the twin who currently believes she's a domesticated cat) is finally asleep in her cot, and you're doom-scrolling on your phone just to keep your eyes open. You have just stumbled across the trending news that Utah influencers Josh and Aubree Jones gave their newborn baby a highly unusual name. They called her Disney. Yes, literally like the corporate mouse.

I'm writing this letter to you from six months in the future, mostly to tell you to stop judging them. Because I know exactly what you're doing right now. You're sitting there in the dark, smelling faintly of old milk, feeling horribly smug about the fact that you and Sarah gave the twins sensible, historical British names. Eleanor and Beatrice. Solid. Dependable. They sound like women who might one day manage a regional branch of a building society or perhaps own a very practical pair of wellington boots.

But let me tell you something about your smugness, past Tom: it's entirely misplaced. At this exact moment in the future, Eleanor refuses to answer to anything except "Pigeon," and Beatrice will only acknowledge your existence if you address her as a minor background character from Peppa Pig. The Jones family, with their massive brood of uniquely named children (Trendy, Zaylee, Sunny, Truly, Journey, Rocky, and now the famous baby Disney), are actually immune to the specific brand of chaos we live in. I'm going to rant about this for a bit because the absurdity of our own choices haunts me daily.

When you name your child something aggressively normal, you practically invite rebellion. A child named Disney already knows the world is absurd and theatrical. A child named Eleanor thinks she's supposed to have a thorough pension plan by age four. Aubree and Josh literally looked at the universe and decided to name their child after a massive entertainment conglomerate because they felt it represented persistence, magic, and joy. I read they were inspired by seeing a shooting star during a difficult labour, which is a lovely sentiment. My own long-standing memory of Sarah's labour was the NHS midwife threatening me with a catheter if I fainted again, which is precisely why we didn't name either of the twins after a celestial event.

The resume test and other absolute fictions

The whole internet lost its collective mind over the Josh and Aubree Jones baby name saga because everyone immediately imagined this poor kid sitting in a corporate job interview in thirty years. People are obsessed with the 'future adult' test. Aubree and Josh actually used an artificial intelligence image generator to see what a thirty-five-year-old woman named Disney would look like, which gave them the confidence to go ahead with it. It sounds completely mad, but I actually think it's a brilliant stroke of modern parenting paranoia.

We spend so much time stressing over how an employer will perceive our child's name in 2055. My health visitor, a lovely but intensely terrifying woman named Brenda, reckons that unusual names build character and make children more resilient, though she admits she read that in a discarded magazine in a dentist's waiting room in 1998, so the science is spectacularly fuzzy. The psychology of baby naming is basically a massive guessing game anyway. You read all these papers about implicit bias and resume sorting, but it's entirely possible that by the time these kids are thirty, human resources departments will have been entirely replaced by algorithms that don't care if you're named David or Disneyland.

Speaking of things that genuinely matter right now, I wish I could send a care package back in time to you on that bathroom floor. Specifically, I'd send you the Panda Teether from Kianao. At the six-month mark, Beatrice's teeth are going to erupt with the fury of a dormant volcano, and she will start biting your actual kneecaps out of sheer frustration. I bought this little silicone panda out of pure desperation one night. It's brilliant. It has these tiny textured bits on the paws that apparently feel amazing on inflamed gums, and it's flat enough that her aggressively uncoordinated chubby fists can honestly hold it without dropping it on the rug every four seconds. I throw it in the dishwasher when it gets covered in dog hair. It saved my kneecaps, Tom. Buy it now.

Why the internet people might genuinely have this figured out

thing is about giving a baby a highly unusual moniker. When your name is already a brand, you kind of bypass the normal childhood bullying ecosystem. Aubree and Josh mentioned their older kids don't get bullied for their names. People online refused to believe this, but I do. Why? Because kids today are growing up in a world where half their class is named after a vowel, a compass direction, or a brand of luxury car.

If you want to grab some gear while you're awake and shopping in the middle of the night, you might look at Kianao's Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. Look, it's fine. The cotton is genuinely quite soft and I suppose it's a relief that it lacks whatever dreadful chemicals high street brands soak their clothes in. But I'll warn you right now that undyed, earthy organic cotton and a massive sweet potato blowout don't mix well. It stains if you even look at it funny. It does, however, stretch very nicely over Pigeon's massive head without her screaming at me, so there's that.

Instead of sitting there in the dark panicking about whether your child will one day be taken seriously in a boardroom, perhaps just accept that we're all winging this entire parenting gig and nobody really cares if you named your baby after a Victorian monarch or an American theme park. If you want to feel better about your choices, you can always browse some sustainable baby gear to convince yourself you're doing a great job.

Protecting them from our terrible choices

The one thing the Jones family does that I entirely respect is keeping their kids off the worst parts of the internet. They explicitly said they don't let their kids see the negative comments. I mean, the sheer volume of unsolicited advice from strangers online is staggering. People were acting as if they had personally been injured by a baby in Utah being named Disney.

I think about little Disney Mae Jones (yes, they gave her the middle name Mae, a surprisingly traditional anchor to tie the whole chaotic thing down) and I realise she will be absolutely fine. She has siblings named Journey and Rocky to run interference for her. She will grow up in a massive, sunlit house where nobody ever seems to have crusted Weetabix on their trousers.

What you should really be worrying about right now, past Tom, is how to keep your own two children entertained while you try to drink a single, tepid cup of tea. We eventually got the Rainbow Wooden Play Gym. It's a wooden A-frame contraption with little textured animals hanging off it. It's lovely to look at, which is a massive upgrade from the plastic monstrosity my mother-in-law bought us that flashes violently and plays a tinny version of 'Old MacDonald' that literally haunts my nightmares. The wooden one is quiet, natural, and Beatrice spends a solid twenty minutes trying to fight the hanging elephant. It buys you time. Time is all you really need.

We spend so much effort stressing over the names, agonising over whether it sounds too harsh, too soft, too weird, too common. We buy thick paperback naming books, we make complicated spreadsheets on our laptops. Then the baby arrives, completely ignores the spreadsheet, covers you in unmentionable bodily fluids, and demands you sing the theme tune to Bluey until your voice gives out. So put the phone down, stop judging the Utah influencers, and maybe stock up on some things from Kianao that will genuinely help you survive tomorrow morning before Beatrice wakes up again.

Questions you're probably asking the bathroom wall right now

Will my child resent me if I give them a highly unusual name?

Look, they're going to resent you anyway. Yesterday Eleanor screamed at me for forty-five solid minutes because I gave her water in the blue cup instead of the slightly different blue cup. A weird name is the absolute least of your worries. Just pick something you don't mind shouting loudly across a crowded park.

Did those internet people really use artificial intelligence to test their baby's name?

Apparently so. They generated a digital image of a thirty-five-year-old woman named Disney to see if it looked respectable. Which sounds utterly unhinged until you realise I spent three hours last week Googling whether it's medically safe for a toddler to eat half a blue crayon. We all have our rather pathetic coping mechanisms.

What honestly happens when a kid with a wild name goes to primary school?

According to my health visitor, they just blend right in. The school register these days sounds like a list of obscure weather patterns, minor Greek deities, and artisan coffee blends. Little Disney is going to be sitting between a kid named Thunder and a kid named Oat. It's completely fine.

How do you find personalised stuff if your kid's name isn't on a standard gift shop keychain?

You simply don't. You save yourself the money, buy them beautiful, unbranded wooden things, and let them furiously write their own name on the living room wall with a permanent marker the second you turn your back to check the oven.