Keeping Up With the Joneses: When Status Becomes a Family Project

Most people would say they do not care what other people think, however, at least on some level, we all do. Social comparison is one of the most fundamental drivers of human behaviour. It operates quietly, often without conscious awareness, shaping our decisions about ‘legitimate’ occupations, places of education, partners, where to live, where children go to school, what holidays need to look like, and what counts as a life that is going ‘well’.

For some families, comparison becomes more than a background influence. It becomes an organising principle. The largely unspoken standard against which decisions are made and against which the family as a unit, is measured.

The question underneath the comparison

In therapy, the question that often sits beneath status anxiety is a simple one: why do you care so much about what other people think? It is never asked unkindly, and it is rarely answered easily. The honest answer usually involves something earlier and more fundamental than the immediate comparison. A childhood and/or early history in which worth was contingent, love was conditional, approval had to be earned, and being seen favourably by others was fundamentally important for safety or belonging.

Comparison persists because it has a function. It is standing in for something else. Comparison becomes a measure of whether you are acceptable, good enough, or whether you are progressing through life in the right way. Fundamentally, whether or not you are safe. Addressing the comparison itself tends to be less useful than understanding what lies beneath it.

When children become the evidence

In families where status and achievement are significant organising forces, children often become an extension of parental success. The schools they attend, the universities they get into. The activities that fill their evenings and weekends (music lessons, dance, sport, additional tutoring) all of this can become less of an aid to child development, and more representative of what it says about the family.

This is rarely conscious or maliciously intended. Most parents in this position genuinely believe that they are acting in their child’s best interests, and often they are. But there is frequently an additional layer. The awareness however unspoken, that a child’s achievements are also an external reflection of themselves, a kind of evidence presented to a wider social world about the family’s success.

Children tend to absorb this even when it isn't spoken about directly. They learn that their performance matters not only to themselves but to something larger. The family’s standing, the parents’ sense of having ‘done well’. That additional weight changes the relationship a child has with their achievements and failures. Both can feel like they belong to the whole family, rather than to the young person alone. Sometimes the cost of this is the child’s anxiety and internalisation of familial high expectations.

What it costs parents

Maintaining a family’s position within a comparison framework is exhausting. The exhaustion tends to be invisible because it looks from the outside, like success. The constant awareness of how things appear. Pressure to ensure that all decisions somehow reflect an implicit, unstated, insatiable, standard.

There is also frequently a cost to the relationship between parents. Status maintenance can become a shared project that leaves little room for anything else, or a source of friction when partners do not equally buy into its importance.

The gap between the image and the reality

What tends to be true of families organised significantly around status and comparison, is that the public image and the private reality diverge, sometimes considerably. The family that appears from outside, to be managing everything with effortless success, is often managing a great deal of strain behind closed doors. Financial pressure, relational distance, children who are struggling under expectations they cannot voice, parents who are exhausted by the maintenance of an image they no longer remember choosing.

This gap is rarely visible to the people experiencing it, because everyone else appears to be 'managing' too. The comparison, in other words, is being made against images that are themselves superficial.

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space to examine where the drive towards comparison comes from, and what it would mean to step back from this. Not in a way that requires abandoning ambition or care for one’s children’s futures, but in a way that allows those things to be chosen rather than driven by external measures that can never quite be satisfied.

For children and young people, therapy can also offer a space to separate their own sense of self from the role they may have unconsciously taken on as their achievements or lack there of, being evidence of their family’s worth.

If any of the themes explored above feel familiar (the exhaustion of keeping pace, the sense that achievement has become a shared family project rather than an individual choice), therapy may provide a beneficial space to reflect on your experiences.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.