How your competitiveness can damage your child

TUNING into your child’s aptitudes and individuality can be derailed by over-attention to what other parents are doing. 

As parents, we want to get it right, but we’re learning on the job and no child comes with a manual, says Joanna Fortune, clinical psychotherapist and director of Solamh Parent-Child Relationship Clinic.

Too often, we look to what other parents are doing as a benchmark. “We don’t know how to measure without comparing, but what gets lost is that parents are experts in their own child and that their instincts should guide them,” says Fortune. There is a tendency to compare milestones — my child isn’t walking, or talking, but another child is. “It goes on to school achievements and hobbies — whose child is doing best in these arenas? The knock-on effect is that children can feel set up in competition with each other,” says Fortune. “Parents may feel they’re discreetly comparing, but children pick up very easily — ‘oh, that’s a great result and what did so-and-so get?’ The child immediately knows he’s being compared.”