Are you a new parent? If you are, do you need help to know where you are going?
Congratulations on joining the new parent club! I was exactly in your shoes 20+ years ago.
At the time, I plus many others are just starting out in our journey - we just got married and are getting a foothold in our relationship with our other (better half). Well, the good news is that we are getting more comfortable with each other and not fighting as much. We probably are doing OK in our jobs when it dawned upon that we have a new mouth to feed. It's not like we are getting a dog or a goldfish. This is a real child!
Now that we know we are going to be parents, we talked to other parents, seeking for advice on what is next. Some go look for books hoping that at the very least, we will not screw up big-time.
There is one problem...we are in Singapore.
Singapore Education System
Singapore, no doubt a tiny nation, has the infamous reputation of being ranked as one of the top-ranked nations in the world by the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which rank which students are the top in the world in reading. math and science. In the last several years, Singapore is ranked #1 in PISA...errr, this is not a good thing for us parents.
If marriage and work and bringing up a little kid is already tough, imagine doing it in this little nation with the smartest kids in the world. It's like going into a room and realizing that your precious child is the dumbest kid in class. For the parent, it's also pretty humbling to walk to the car-park and seeing that some parents are driving Bentleys, Maseratis and Ferrarris.
Issues with Parenting books
One issue is that the books that I found are all written by experts based in the US, Europe and Australia. While there is no doubt the authors know what they are doing, there is a difference when the context is in a not-so-high PISA nation. The goalposts are difference. So yes, we are pretty much on our own.
One more problem - most books are usually done by "experts" who went to school to learn how to do this. My question is whether these experts really "practice what they preach" - did the author's own children come up tops? I would love to read books written by the parents of Olympic athletes, successful entrepeneurs, doctors, Nobel prize winners so that I can learn how to bring up my kids.
Well, I found two...
- "Bring Up Genius!" by Laszlo Polgar, father of the Polgar sisters (chess)
- "Black and White" by Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena Williams (tennis)
We shall explore the lessons provided in the lines of these and see how we can apply this to bringing up my own children.
Successful Parenting
My goal is not to bring up a world-class whatever...but I guess that if I can guide my children such that they are able to find a place in this world, or at the very least do better than what I did (which is not a whole lot) that is sufficient. I like the quote by Chan Chung Sing, former Singapore Minister of Educaton and now Minister of Defence when he says:
Our defnition of success is never about how well we do for ourselves in this generation, but how well we enable the next generation to do even better
- Chan Chun Sing
Introduction to Infancy to IC
This book is where I wrote about my 20-year parenting journey guiding my 2 kids through the Singapore education system, i.e. how they went through the early years and got admitted into the Gifted Education Program, and to Raffles Institution, and then admission (with scholarships) into the top schools - Imperial College, University College, NUS College, NTU, Waseda, etc.
Hopefully, through reading this, you will find some insights on how to bring up your kids and my wish is that they can do the same or even better.
"Infancy to IC" is available in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo or at Partridge
All the best to you...
Theophilus Huang
