What is a Must-Do to ensure my child's success in life?

I am a first-time parent of a young child. What is the one thing I must do now to ensure the success of my child?

Interesting question, and a very common one for first-time parents. I asked the same question over twenty years ago. Obviously, the most common answer is "it depends" but after seeing some success with 2 kids going to the top 10 universities in the world (and speaking to countless parents with the same experience), I probably can answer this with a reasonable confidence that it is the correct answer.

The answer: read to your child.

To many, this a pretty obvious answer, but knowing does not equal to doing. When I say read to your child, it means to do this on a regular basis and to set up a cadence for doing this for years. For me, it starts with 5 minutes at first and then extend this to 10 minutes, then 15 minutes and then even for 30 minutes. As your child progresses, you can then point to the word and have your child repeat what you have read. There will come a day, when yoru child will read the word before you can...and yes, your child can read.

Next question: is there a best time to do the reading?

This is a "yes" and not because I know so (plus many other parents who may have the same experience). In a study by the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, it was found that reading before naptime or sleep help facilitates memory consolidation and aids learning. In the same study, it ws stated that shared storybook reading also helps young children learn vocabulary and promotes later academic success.

So, there you have it...if you want your child to do well - read to your child before bedtime.

Yes, it is that simple.

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management. As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy. Purely speaking, time management (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing. Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am. In truth, what ...

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad. Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all. Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is. The Journey to College By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...

Paving the Wei

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