After giving them life, the most important gift we may give our children is their name. Many parents want unique and individual names for their children, so they choose to avoid the most popular of baby names. Every year, the Social Security Administration reports statistics on the most used names, making it pretty easy to eliminate names likely to belong to a half dozen of your child's future peers.

But there are definitely pros and cons to choosing distinctively different names.

Popular names are popular for a reason – lots of people are using them. Obviously there's some motivation to pick a more common name for children.

"Selecting a popular name provides parents with a measure of comfort," says Paul Krantz, senior editor of TopBabyNames.com. "They know, right from the start, that their child's name will be familiar to family, friends and their youngster's classmates. There's also less likelihood that the child will be embarrassed by his or her name, or that it will be mispronounced or misspelled."

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