How to Compare Less and Appreciate More
How often do you compare yourself to other parents? Do you find yourself thinking, “If only I could handle toddler tantrums as calmly and gently as Jamie!” or “Why don’t our children play totally independently like the Matthews?”? Do you look at their lives from the outside and feel disheartened? Or on the flip side, do you find yourself judging other parents’ decisions and thinking negatively about them? Does this comparison take up valuable mental and emotional space for you?
We’ve found ourselves there plenty of times, so we thought we’d jump right into this pervasive struggle of parenthood. Although it can be very helpful to learn from other parents, it can also create a comparison spiral that takes away your focus from the children right in front of you. It starts from the beginning, when we are comparing pregnancy bumps and registries, feeling a lack of confidence in our ability to become parents. Comparing our baby’s sleep, eating habits, and weight gain to our friends’ babies, we can easily think we are doing things wrong or just need to be more like another parent. Or we can feel superior to another mom when our baby sleeps through the night at six weeks, while she is up at all hours of the night, even though it probably has a lot more to do with the baby’s temperament than anything we did.
Social media might come up often here on d is for decisions, because of the inevitable strong influence it has over our modern-day parenting. We’ve heard a million times that people’s lives are filtered on Instagram, yet we still have a hard time remembering that when we are scrolling and comparing. There is so much of the messiness and struggle that we don’t see there. While we aren’t advocating that parenting accounts wallow in the hard, we are encouraging a social media lens that takes in what is helpful and acknowledges that our perception from the outside is skewed and missing in some ways.
We can’t mention social media without the constant marketing of products and services. All of your favorite accounts are promoting their brands, convincing you that you can’t live without a certain product, and implying that you are not a great parent if your children don’t have this toy, that snack, or a nontoxic toothpaste. There is so much money to be made in social marketing, and while it can be an effective way to receive recommendations from people you trust, we have to be aware of the comparison fuel it can provide.
One of the most effective ways to counteract comparison is gratitude. We can often forget to be grateful for all the blessings we have, but when we take a few minutes to look around, we see how much we can be thankful for. This helps us lean into the uniqueness of our own family and our parental intuition. When you feel yourself being pulled into a comparison cycle, ask yourself, “What am I doing well? How are my spouse and I working together smoothly as a parenting team?” You have your own talents and strengths that will make your parenting different from every other parent. Let go of the expectations to be like everyone else on social media or in your moms group, and figure out how you can address your challenges in a creative and personal way.
