How DUCK DYNASTY Star Helped Her Daughter Escape the Comparison Trap
By Movieguide® Contributor
DUCK DYNASTY star Korie Robertson is reflecting on parenting, specifically when she had to help her daughter Bella escape the comparison trap that so many teen girls get caught in.
“When Bella turned 16, I was throwing her this sweet 16 birthday party and she actually kind of got very into like the details and wanted it to be perfect and didn’t want to be embarrassed by me doing something that was too out there, you know,” Robertson recalled on her new “LO Mama” podcast. “I like to do things that are really fun…but Bella was a little bit more in that kind of more self-conscious, I guess, teenager phase, and I remember…[she] wanted to kind of like approve everything about it, and we had to have a conversation.”
“I had to say, ‘Bella, a birthday party is thrown for you. You need to just be grateful and show up. Just trust that whatever it is. If it’s not perfect, if it’s not exactly the way you would have done it, you’re not throwing it for yourself. It’s being thrown for you,'” she continued. “And so she took that and was really great about it. It was kind of that moment that she had to kind of sit back. I think she had gotten a little off.”
Robertson recognized that comparison had taken hold of Bella at that moment, and allowing comparison to control us can rob us of enjoying the gifts God gives us.
“There’s things, you know, you look at online or where people are, and it’s so easy to compare yourself or…what party someone’s throwing for you or compare whatever to whatever else is online, so we can all deal with that as moms or as, you know, as a 50-year-old woman or as a 23-year-old, you know, figuring out where you are in life,” Robertson concluded.
The high use of social media today among teen girls has driven levels of comparison through the roof, leading to high levels of self-consciousness, as Movieguide® recently reported:
A survey taken by Ruling Our Experiences (ROX) found that in 2017 only “9% of 5th grade girls spent 6 or more hours each day using social media.”
Now, 46% of girls spend more than six hours a day on social media.
“Why does this matter? The Girls’ Index™ found there is a relationship between confidence and social media use,” ROX wrote on Instagram. “Lower levels of social media use correlate with increased reports of confidence among girls. Increased time spent on social media is correlated with reports of lower levels of confidence.”
ROX explained that “girls who spend the most amount of time on social media (10+ hours per day) are 25% less likely to describe themselves as confident than those who spend the least amount of time on social media (under 2 hours per day).”
Robertson’s other daughter, Sadie Robertson Huff, has also reflected on how she fights comparison.
“If you’re comparing yourself to someone, you are always going to feel less than because you cannot be them. There’s a reason for that. That you feel less than. Because if you’re in comparison to them, you will be less than they are because you’re not them,” she said last year.
“God did create us uniquely and originally, and we can be confident in who we are enough to cheer on others and not feel less than,” Huff added.
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