How Much Do You Compare & Compete With Other Parents?
Do you ever compare your childâs behaviour or progress with other children of the same age?
Itâs tempting to use other childrenâs development as benchmarks for your own childrenâs development.
For instance, you may notice that your friendsâ five year old can count to 100 easily, while your own five year old struggles to count to 10. Itâs easy to think, âWhatâs wrong with my son? Why canât he count to 100?âItâs also tempting to use other childrenâs behaviour as benchmarks for your own childâs behaviour.For example, you may notice your friendâs daughter just loves to sit and chat after school, while your child just wants to sit in front of the TV when she gets home. Itâs easy to think, âWhatâs wrong with my daughter? Why doesnât she want to sit with me and talk about school? Whatâs wrong with ME?â
Comparing your child with others is a stress-inducing and, ultimately, useless activity.
BUT itâs a natural thing to do.We assess our progress in any area of life by checking out how we compare with our peers. When we were kids in school we compared ourselves to our schoolmates. We knew the academic hierarchy our classroom. Our teachers may not have graded us, but we knew who the smart kids were and where we ranked in the order of things.As parents we still keep eye on our peers. We use the progress and behaviour of their kids as benchmarks to help us assess our own performance as well as our kidsâ progress. This is okay, as long as we donât lose sight of three important aspects:
All parents should take pride on their childrenâs performance at school, in sport or their leisure activities. You should also celebrate their achievements and milestones such as, taking their first steps, getting their first goal in a game or getting great marks at school.
BUT you shouldnât have too much personal stake in your childrenâs success or in their milestones, as this close association makes it hard to separate yourself from your kids. It also leads you to play the “compare & compete game” â i.e. by comparing kids you can put pressure on yourself and them to perform for the wrong reasons.
And certainly, your self-esteem as a parent should not be explicitly linked to your childrenâs behaviour or developmental levels.
Quite simply, some kids are more difficult than othersâ¦â¦â¦â¦â¦so it takes a bold parent to hoist their self-esteem sail to the developmental or behavioural mast of their child.
“You are not your child” is a challenging but essential parental concept to live by. Doing so takes real maturity and altruism, but it is the absolute foundation of that powerful thing known as âunconditional loveâ.
Michael Grose is Australia’s NO. 1 parenting expert. He is the director of Parenting Ideas, the author of seven books for parents and a popular presenter who speaks to audiences in Australia, Singapore and the USA. Get your FREE Chores and Responsibilities for Kids Guide when you visit http://www.parentingideas.com.au
Get a hold of Michael’s sensational new book Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change It at www.michaelgrose.com. You’ll be astounded when you learn about your birth order personality and how the postion in your family impacts on your life!