We are wired to measure ourselves against everyone else. Here's what that's quietly doing to us as parents – and the small, science-backed shift that helps us step out.
We were at a friend’s house on a warm summer afternoon. The kids were in and out of the pool, shrieking and splashing, and my friend and I had settled onto the patio with a pot of tea, chatting and watching them play.
My son was doggy-paddling his way to the far end of the pool — arms everywhere, struggling to make it to the wall — while right beside him, his friend glided past. Proper freestyle and a neat little tumble turn at the end.
Something in me went quiet and tight. Was I doing enough? Should I have started lessons earlier? Had I missed some window everyone else clearly knew about? What was the other family doing that I wasn’t?
If you have ever had a moment like that (at the pool, at the school gate, at a birthday party, halfway down a stranger’s Instagram feed at 22:00), you are running exactly the software you were built with.
Your brain compares because it’s trying to keep you safe
Back in 1954, a psychologist named Leon Festinger noticed something true about all of us. When we don’t have an objective way to measure ourselves, we measure against other people instead. Are we doing okay? Well, how is everyone else doing? For our ancestors, this was survival: knowing where you stood in the group meant knowing you were safe.
What it costs and what our children catch
Comparison doesn’t only steal our joy; it quietly reshapes how we see our children.
Our children are extraordinary readers of us. They feel the difference between I see you and I’m measuring you.
Carol Dweck’s work on mindset shows that when we focus children on how they measure up – how clever, how gifted, how far ahead – we accidentally teach them that their worth is a fixed thing to be proven and protected. But when we notice the effort, the strategy, the trying-again, we grow a child who believes they can stretch. Our comparison habit and their growth mindset are quietly linked. They learn to measure the way they watch us measure.
The water they swim in
Comparison itself isn’t new. Children measured themselves against the handful of kids in their class or on their street. Today the comparison set is endless and curated – social media hands them a highlight reel of everyone else’s life around the clock, whispering that their own real, ordinary, still-in-progress days are somehow not enough. As parents, we do the same, holding our messy, behind-the-scenes lives up against everyone else’s best. Researchers have found that the more we compare this way online, the worse we tend to feel. We are comparing our bloopers to their trailer.
And it isn’t only online. Childhood itself has quietly become something we measure – reading levels, percentile charts, gala times, leader boards, marks out of a hundred, likes and followers. Somewhere along the way we started ranking our children the way we rank everything else. That, in the end, is comparison culture: a constant, low hum telling all of us, parent and child alike, that wherever we are, someone is further ahead.
The small shift that changes everything
Comparison isn’t something we eliminate; it’s something we redirect.
And here is the part that matters most: if you are not deliberately building an internal standard in your child, the external one becomes their default. The world will happily hand your child a measuring stick – so we have to hand them a better one first. I call it an internal measuring stick.
An internal measuring stick is exactly what it sounds like. The benchmark lives inside the child, not out there in the class group or the cousin’s report card or the neighbour’s trophy shelf. The only question it asks is: Am I growing? Not am I winning? A child who measures with an external stick is always at the mercy of someone else. A child who measures with an internal one is running their own race – and that is the only race that has ever mattered.
The beautiful thing is that this shift lives in the small, everyday questions we ask. Watch what changes when you swap them:
- Instead of “Did you win?” try “What did you learn?”
- Instead of “What did you get?” try “Do you understand it better than you did before?”
I tell my own kids all the time: the only person you are competing with is who you were yesterday.
Do this often enough and something quietly powerful happens – it starts to shape who your child believes they are. Not “I’m the fast one” or “I’m the clever one,” labels that can shatter the moment someone faster or cleverer comes along, but something far sturdier: I’m someone who tries hard. I’m someone who keeps going when things are difficult. I’m someone whose brain is always growing.
So the next time you or your child starts comparing, take a breath, feel your feet on the ground, and ask one gentle question – Am I a better version of myself than I was yesterday?
My son, by the way, is still learning how to swim, still wobbly with his strokes, still can’t do a tumble turn … yet.
All in his own time.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
In our home, there is no such thing as “I can’t.’’ It’s important that children know that they can do anything if they just try. …
