Stop comparing your kids to their cousins: a memo I wrote to myself (and my in-laws)

My husband's sister lives in Kowloon Tong. Her son — let's call him Perfect Cousin — is three months older than my daughter, attends a DSS school, plays violin at Grade 6, speaks English with an American accent from his international kindergarten, and recently won a citywide mathematics competition for his age group.

I know all of this not because I've asked but because my mother-in-law tells us at every family dinner, with a warmth that does not conceal the comparison underneath. The information arrives wrapped in admiration for Perfect Cousin and followed, always, by a question about my daughter's recent achievements. The questions are not malicious. They are the specific social function of family, which is to help you understand where you stand.

Where I stand, apparently, is slightly behind Perfect Cousin.

I want to be careful here because this is family, and families are complicated, and I genuinely do not believe anyone is trying to be cruel. My mother-in-law loves my children. The comparison is automatic — as natural to her as breathing, as natural as it was to her mother before her. Hong Kong families have always calibrated themselves against each other. The anxiety around educational achievement did not begin with this generation; we just have WhatsApp now, which means the calibration happens in real time.

But here is what the Perfect Cousin comparison was doing to my daughter.

She knew about it. Children always know. They pick up the quality of a room's attention when they walk in. They notice which achievements get mentioned and which get passed over. They feel the difference between praise and praise-as-comparison. My daughter, who is a funny, warm, genuinely curious child who writes little books about cats, had started describing herself as "not as smart" as her cousin. She was eight years old and had already developed an internal ranking system in which she was losing.

I wrote what I privately called the memo — not an actual memo, but a conversation I had with my husband first and then, more carefully, with my mother-in-law. The core argument was this: comparing the children against each other produces no useful outcome. Perfect Cousin's Grade 6 violin does not make my daughter a better musician. His maths competition win does not give her a reason to try harder — it gives her a reason to feel defeated before she tries. If we want her to develop academic confidence and genuine effort, she needs to be compared only to herself.

My mother-in-law heard this with the face of someone receiving information they find mildly offensive. She did not agree immediately. What she said, after a silence, was "We just want the best for all of them." And she meant it. That's the thing about this kind of comparison — it comes from love, badly expressed.

The family dynamics shifted slowly. My husband got better at deflecting the comparison questions at dinner. I got better at redirecting — when Perfect Cousin's achievements came up, I would ask a genuine question about him as a person, not as a credential. This didn't stop the comparison culture entirely, but it changed the temperature.

More importantly, I stopped doing it myself.

Here is the confession that is harder than anything about the in-laws: I was doing a version of the comparison inside my own head constantly. Not to Perfect Cousin specifically — to an unnamed composite of children at my daughter's school who seemed to be doing better, more, faster. Every time someone in the class group chat mentioned their child's reading level, I was running the comparison. Every report card was filtered through a map of where everyone else sat.

This internal comparison was doing the same thing to me that the family comparison was doing to my daughter. It was making her achievements invisible to me. It was making her herself invisible — not the credential she was accumulating, but the actual person, the funny cat-book writer, the one who spends forty-five minutes on a cardboard drawbridge.

I have not solved this. The comparison instinct is deep and the social reinforcement of it in Hong Kong is constant. But I have named it, which at minimum means I sometimes catch myself doing it before it reaches my face.

My daughter does not need to be better than her cousin. She does not need to be better than anyone. She needs to be better than she was last month at the things that matter to her growth. That is the only race worth running.

I'm still working on believing this fully. The family dinner in two weeks will be a test.