You’ve seen it and you hate it. You swear you’re never going to do it. When you get right down to it though, you can’t help yourself.
You always compare your kids against the other ones.
The other day we visited my sister and her kids, and they gave me a birthday present for Simon. (He’s a year! An entire year! How did that happen?) The card was signed with the cousins’ names, and Madeline, the almost-4-year-old, had written the names. An ungainly, wobbly scrawl, but legible.
Sophia’s written a couple of letters on her own, but mostly by accident, I think. I told myself, she doesn’t need to write yet. But still…I got a little flicker of “Does this mean anything?” down in my stomach.
Then today we ran into a mom and a 3.5 year old in the park, and the two girls played together some with Simon while I talked to the mom. (Another adult. Whoo hoo.) I asked her about her daughter’s preschool and she told me how impressed she was with them: her daughter could count up to 13, she knew all her shapes and colors, and she knew most of her letters, although sometimes she didn’t recognize one…
Ha! I thought. Sophia counts up to twenty all the time and she’s doing rudimentary addition and subtraction (particularly when it comes to figuring out how many cookies everyone gets). She not only knows her letters, but one of her favorite activities at P.F. Chang’s (if you give her half a chance, Sophia is happy to tell you that “P.F. Chang’s is my favorite restaurant”) is to take everyone’s chopsticks and form letters with them.
This comparison thing is not only a bad idea but it’s lethal. Lethal and endemic. Constant testing, constant comparison. “You’ve got to do better in school! You’ve got to keep your GPA high! You’ve got to make a lot of money!”
Of course, I’m lucky enough to have gotten the two best kids ever, so that’s okay. But what if I hadn’t?
Boy, do I feel your happily avoided potential pain.
I Have A Theory, fwiw, that all kids learn to do whatever works best for them in the business of Getting Stuff. The verbals have parents who respond to verbal stuff, or just are better naturally suited to it – the physicals find going after stuff less frustrating or better rewarded – and we only reinforce the behaviors that fit our picture of what we think they should be developing instead of the behavior that works best for them.
I don’t really have any theories about how this shakes down, based on my one kid, but I do think that the best way to get the kid to give things a try is to make them feel really successful at the things they figure out for themselves, and that they’re good at.