The Price of Comparison: Protecting Your Child's Mental Health.
Each person is born with an individual identity combined with genetic and biological factors. Even children from the same household may be completely different from each other on their cognitive abilities, including IQ, memory capacity, and learning styles depending on the side of the family they received their genes.
The way a child responses emotionally with their reactions, coping mechanisms, and emotional resilience are also unique to each child, according to their genetics and how they experience life with their own perspectives.
1. Lost individuality
Being compared to others can make the child question their own sense of self. It stops them from discovering their own strengths and weaknesses, interests and dislikes, passions and dreams. They often feel pressured to live up to someone else’s achievements or traits. This usually happens when parents sign up their kids for sports or activities or choose the educational program or path for their child when it’s time for college or university. Caretakers do this for many reasons, to imitate other family and friends, to prove to others that their kids know more, to make the child be involved with their own interest, or to live their own dreams through their children. Often the child grows up to be an unhappy adult following their parents’ interests or attributes, while losing their own individuality.
2. Chase Unachievable Goals
Each child developmental stage is unique and comparing a child to another will create pressure in the child to meet a goal or standard that is not achievable or not aligned with their own interests and abilities. An example of this is when caretakers enrol their children in activities such as swimming at the age of 4, because every other parent is doing it, and when they notice that the child is not performing well or struggling to even get into the water, they often feel with time and practice they will be fine and keep pressuring the child to continue instead of understanding that it may not be the right activity for their child at that age. This causes a lot of trauma, stress and brings anxiety of failure to the child as they grow older where they always chase a goal that is not attainable.
3. Have Low Self-Esteem
Comparison often involves highlighting the other child’s strength and success, which can decrease their self-esteem. An electrical engineer can’t be thrown in the sea to manage 15 fishermen, that’s a job of the captain or manager of the ship. It wouldn’t make sense to call him weak for something he is not made to do, physically or intellectually. He may be asked to fix the electrical wires that are malfunctioned in the ship. To understand this better, let’s examine weakness instead of strength. When you can’t perform well at something, it is labeled that we are weak at it. We are not supposed to be good at everything, nor every child is meant to be great at math or science. Some are meant to be an artist, writer, speaker, politician or singer and without this acceptance we won’t have Picasso, Shakespeare, Mozart, Tony Robbins, Obama or Whitney Houston. While focusing on their weakness we diminish their willingness to discover their own strength and a create mindset that they will never be good enough.
4. Lost Growth and Opportunity
Evolution plays an important part in opportunities that are presented to each child depending on their country, background, available resources and their surroundings. The jobs or the careers that presented promising outcomes to have a safe and good lifestyle to the parent 15 years ago may not apply at the present timeline. The enormous amount of engineers driving taxi in India, the students with masters without a decent job in North America, and the thousands of IT employees who were unemployed, the millions of businesses that were closed down all around the world as a result of the pandemic is just a small example of the ever changing climate of this world. When the child is always being compared, they no longer can focus on personal growth and self development diminishing their ability to take risk, try new things or withstand the ever changing world, and they are made to run after doing better than someone else while that someone else may not even be living in the same country or have the job which they worked for. The Covid pandemic and the speedy growth in digital technology had taught us that the world can change within 24 hours. Even the map of the world never remained the same.
5. Rivalry and Resentment
Comparing a child to their siblings, relatives or peers creates a toxic competitive atmosphere between them. It is never taken seriously when a father or mother points out the success of one child in the family lowering the other child. This promotes the child to look at them as a rival and enemy than a loved one or ally. When they become adults this toxic enforcement is more likely to create a split in the family or friends and causes the other to become more jealous, revengeful, angry and show much resentment, while the other has no clue why they are being looked as an enemy when they haven’t done any harm but shown love. Jealousy and hate towards family, friends or peers is not just created in an adult’s mind, it is planted when they were children by someone else, it is actually the hate that they have for themselves for not being good enough with insecurities. They can show this hate in many ways to bring the other down, including spreading rumours and lies, ruining their support from family and friends, ruining their opportunities in their career and relationships even harming them, so they can feel like they exist and they are enough and worthy, when they believe to have brought down the other. Constantly taking it as a competition against someone who they never needed to compete against. Sometimes even with strangers.
In summary,
comparing your child to other children can have permanent negative effects on their individuality, self-esteem, anxiety and stress in taking on new challenges that come with age, relationships and take away their chances to become strong individuals instead of measuring their own worth by comparison. Caretakers should focus on helping their child to discover their strength with patience even if they see the child fail in many things to help the child discover their own abilities and strengths.
