Comparison: The Thief of Joy (and Childhood Too)
Children are not exam papers. You don’t need to check one and say, “Look at this one, learn from her.” Comparison may look harmless. Sometimes even motivating. But slowly, quietly, it plants a strange idea in a child’s head — that life is a race with limited medals. If someone else wins, it must mean they lost. So children stop enjoying their own journey. Instead of discovering what they love, they start calculating where they stand. Every cousin becomes competition. Every friend becomes a scoreboard. Years later, these children grow into adults who struggle to clap for others. Not because they are jealous by nature, but because they were raised believing someone else’s success steals their share. But life doesn’t work like a single-slice pizza. Someone else getting a piece doesn’t mean yours disappears. Children grow best when they are watered, not compared. Let them bloom differently. After all, roses and sunflowers never argued about who is taller.
