Teach your children how to be themselves

There are things we pick up from our parents and other authority figures that become a life long obsession, grounded in inferiority.  The word for the day here is, “comparison or comparing”.  

Commercials and advertising give us comparisons of  ‘be like this, so you won’t be like that’. 

  “Comparison is the death of contentment”

Comparison is defined as ‘set together (in your mind) and examine with respect to likeness or unlikeness, agreement or disagreement.  The act of comparing the relation between persons or things, with a view to discover their agreement or resemblance or their disagreement or difference. 

For me comparison meant looking for the disagreement and difference to become more like someone else, look more like them, act more like them, have what they had, etc.  It was the typical ‘grass is greener on the other side of the fence’ idea.  

The grass is greener on the other side of the fence

 This was how I was raised and indoctrinated in the things of life.  If people wanted something out of me, it was, “Why can’t you be like so and so?”  There were some things I was rated more highly in than my siblings….the report cards.  Although I was sloppy and marked down for my slip hanging below my hemline and my hair not well kept, the rest of academia was straight A’s.  My siblings were always being compared to me to come up to my level academically. 

The Chameleon Woman Creates Chameleon Children

As I reached teen years, I found that the process was carried out daily in my own mind by comparing my looks to the teens style and looks in the magazine and in my peers.  Then I would spend large amounts of time trying to come up to the images the influencers ‘sold me’.   I was deep into a ‘diminished identity’ , quickly becoming a ‘chameleon woman’….ever changing to reflect everyone else, thereby ‘fitting or blending in’. 

Look at your life with your children now.  Have you carried over some of your own comparisons that were handed down to you by authority figures?  Your child is fresh and sponge-like.  Will you leave them a legacy of ‘comparing’ themselves to others lifestyles and a spiritual life that eliminates the idea of their having a special life of their own to live?  Think of how many things we’ve compared ourselves to and become copies of them and not the real, authentic people who we were destined to be. 

Find and Promote Your Child’s Bent….Uniqueness

This is your chance to do ‘a check up from the neck up’.  Look for the ways you may be promoting ‘comparisons’ that would train your children to become clones….remakes of other people’s lives.  Each one of your children is unique.  They may act like someone else, but that doesn’t mean they should be compared so as to make them a more perfect representation of that someone.  Find ‘the bent…the uniqueness’ of your child and promote that.  We tell our children all the time how special they are and in the next breath we’re defining who they should be like by comparison.  

The scripture comes to mind, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older he will not depart from it”.  When you do a word study on the phrase, ‘the way he or she should go’, you’ll find it means to train them according to their bent or personality makeup.  There is no ‘one mold’ that each child is to be conformed to.  There are basics for each child’s life, a foundation if you will, but no where does it talk about ‘cookie cutter’ children in the bible. 

Who, Not What,  Will Your Children Become?

Now think about the heaviness in our own lives of having compared, feeling the inadequacy and then become a clone of someone else’s life.  Does the old saying, “Keeping up with the Joneses” stir something in you?  Is the body size and fashions of this time been defined for you by your own comparison and then depression because you can’t ‘fit the comparison’? 

You may have grown up this way, but by your own choice now, your children don’t have to also grow up with the mindset ‘compare and become…. someone else’.   Ask yourself, “What is my measuring stick for who I am?”  

Do you feel you’re giving an example of the ‘authentic you’ to your children?  Do you know people who are mere ‘shadows’ of other people due to living a comparison mentality?    Heavy thinking, and I’d love to hear your comments about this.