Never compare, because no two children are alike

Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher
Young Adult Columnist

Comparison is the thief of joy. On my social media accounts this week, that’s the message that kept repeating itself. 

Now, granted, much of my newsfeed lately has been posts from the various child development accounts that I follow. But I think it’s an important message: parenting guilt and shame is a real thing. Taking our twins to their pediatrician’s appointments, we’re constantly being told whether they are “on track” and whether they’ve met certain milestones. And then, in the same breath, it seems we’re also being told that each child develops differently.

So, which is it? And what’s a mom to do? 

The other day, I found myself talking to a friend with a 13-month-old and watching as her child was walking around the backyard. Now, we’re not talking about a confident walk. There was a lot of starting and stopping, a lot of alternating between walking and falling and crawling. But he was still walking, primarily, unassisted. 

My boys, in the past few weeks, begun cruising – pulling themselves up and tentatively moving their feet along the furniture. And they’re 11 months. It seems almost unfathomable that in a mere two months they’ll be walking unassisted, especially since it took quite some time for them to crawl.

And what did I do after my FaceTime chat? I Googled walking. There I was, comparing my children to other children and wondering whether mine were behind. I was asking myself whether I, as a working parent, should be devoting more time to helping my babies learn to walk; whether I could be doing more to help them learn “x” skill.

It’s a constant struggle because we all, I think, want to be good parents. We want to give our children the best. But it’s also important to remember that we, as parents, are doing the best we can. And, more importantly, that each child is different and develops in his or her unique way.

Having twins drives this home even more poignantly. One of my boys is very observant, very cautious. He watches and learns by watching. The other learns by doing, and that child was attempting to crawl – sometimes doing “the worm” on the ground, sometimes scooting – very early. And finally, after many months, he figured it out. My observer watched and waited – he watched his brother attempt crawling; he watched the dogs; he watched us. And then suddenly overnight, he just crawled. What a difference!

This act of comparison – and the subsequent judging that occurs – seems to be an aspect of human DNA. We’re always doing it. It’s not only a parenting thing. I see it in the students I teach and their comparison of themselves to other classmates. When grades are received, it’s the immediate question that gets asked to a friend in the class: “What did you get?”

Where does this come from? Why is there this insistent voice within us that not only has the desire to know how another person has done, but forms a judgment on it – as though that grade is a reflection of what they’ve done “right” or “wrong”? As though my parenting is “good” or “needs improvement”?

As I tell the college students in my classroom during the first week of class, the letter grade shouldn’t matter. No one is going to ask you in the working world what grade you earned in a specific class. What future employers care about is the process of learning – What did you learn? How did you improve?

Because, in the end, we should be celebrating our differences, not comparing ourselves to those around us and feeling guilty or shamed as a result.

Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at [email protected].