That was food for thought for me. I’ve always assessed enrichment classes based on their quality and content, and not whether they are offered by brand-name institutions. For instance, I wouldn’t send my children to a particularly popular speech and drama enrichment centre located at the Forum, which many parents flock to because it’s supposedly good, but which I find only mediocre and not worth the money. And although Zoe is now attending art classes at a school in the Esplanade, she goes to a nearby community centre for ballet lessons because it’s convenient and because the teacher is qualified and experienced.

I’ve never considered whether the girls would eventually come to develop snobbery over the fact that they attend classes at “good” schools versus subsidised ones at the CCs. I certainly hope they don’t. In any case, expensive or branded does not equal good, but that’s something only a mature adult can recognise with accumulated wisdom.

Right now, K’s and my main worry is about keeping them grounded when it comes to dining out. We do our grocery run every Tuesday evening after dinner. On the way to the mall, the girls will inevitably ask to have Japanese, or pasta, or Chinese food at places like Crystal Jade. They never say “food court” when we ask them where they’d like to go for dinner. The announcement that we will be dining at the food court is almost always met with expressions of dismay, which of course makes K and me even more resolute about making them eat there. We don’t want the girls to get used to eating at a restaurant, such that it becomes the only acceptable choice. Our efforts are paying off slowly – now, the dismay is palpably fainter. Alison is happy to go to the stall of her choice to order and pay for her food, while Zoe will gleefully order wanton mee as part of her mission to eat it at every mealtime.

Alison and Zoe at the Parkway Parade basement food court.

Since we moved to our new home last September, K and I have been very aware that our changed living circumstances may result in the girls mistakenly thinking that they have moved up in the world. Although in Zoe’s case, we have moved down. A couple of months ago, she looked up in wonder at the HDB flats near our house and said in wonder, “There are people living up there.” She has apparently forgotten that she used to live “up there” as well. That’s a bit of a problem for us because we don’t want the girls to start their lives thinking that they must aspire to private property ownership from the get-go.

Do other parents worry about their offspring acquiring an inflated sense of self-worth in terms of material possessions and stature? Or do they bring up their kids to live to the manner born? K and I want the kids to learn the value of money, and also the importance of working hard to get somewhere in life. Not to have things handed to them on a silver platter, even if we well able to do so. But the line between being spoilt and living up to the current norms of society is so grey, I sometimes wonder if we are overthinking this.

What do you think?

Perhaps therein lies the rub. I have a couple of friend requests in my Facebook account that I have not approved because I’ve decided to keep my friends list trim and limited only to people I actually interact with, because there’s no point being in touch with people only through the tenuous link of a Facebook friendship if you don’t bother to maintain it by actual connection. Maybe we are all moving towards a smaller circle of friends, to keep it simple.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1997. In that time, I’ve gotten into many disagreements with people whom I hardly know. The arguments have ranged from how a virtual community was being run, to breastfeeding and attachment parenting, to home decor, and other really silly things that I  would not bother to get involved with in real life but somehow feel compelled to join the fray, online.

The funny thing is that I abhor confrontation, and I get very upset when these disagreements happen. Which really doesn’t explain why I got into them in the first place. I guess it can be chalked up to my tendency to speak very frankly and directly which leads strangers to incorrectly assume that I’m being nasty when I’m really just calling it as I see it. Some people can handle truth, and some people can’t. I suppose also that being on the Internet makes everyone franker than they really are, except that people are no less sensitive to criticism and innuendo online than they are in real life.

But I’m happy to say that nastiness has formed only a very small part of my Internet life. I’ve developed some good friendships through the web over the years. Some have remained good online friends, while others have crossed the rubicon and become my close friends in real life. I’m glad for their presence. So while I may feel a bit bothered when someone de-friends me on Facebook, I know that the ones who matter are the ones who are still sticking around. If I lose one, I lose one. The world keeps turning, and my net result is still a gain.

If both or at least one parent is university educated, the chances of the home background would be more favourably supportive, with books and all the paraphernalia that makes for a learning child. That is the situation we face – to get the lesser educated parents to understand that at an early stage, they must try to get their children accustomed to go to the library, reading, trying to get used to acquiring knowledge by themselves, and not being spoon-fed by the teachers. – Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew

Eugenics rears its ugly head again in Singapore. It’s nothing new, really, just one very important and influential man’s view that you must be a university graduate in order to produce children who will be successful in life.

I guess my daughters are less desirable citizens, then, since they are the offspring of one university graduate (me) and one graduate from the school of life (K). It must be only on my encouragement that they read so widely, like going to the library and bookstore, and generally soak up knowledge like sponges. K has little or nothing to do with it, since he didn’t slog through four years of meaningless modules in university to qualify him as being  a good parent in the holistic development sense. And yes, those four years were a waste of time, because I learned nothing then that has helped me be a better person or parent now.

A few days ago, Alison threw a fit over her inability to do subtraction in the hundreds. “My heart is not in it,” she whined, tears threatening to flow. I trotted out all the pep talk material I could think of – you need mathematics in daily life, it’s a core subject in school, you’ll study it for at least the next seven years of your life, you don’t have to get As, but you do have to try your best, so you’d better suck it up. It all fell on deaf ears, and the threatened tears became an actual torrent.

Then K came into the room, sat down, and opened his mouth. He took a completely different tack, probably figuring that Alison had had enough haranguing from her mother for one day. To be good at something, he said, you have to work at it. Only when you’ve worked hard enough to be good at it, will it become fun. So you need to do the 3Ps – Picture, Practise, Perfect. You picture yourself doing your sums well, then you practise and practise until it becomes really easy to do it, and soon enough, you will perfect it. He went on to say other motivational things which I have forgotten, but which clearly got through to Alison, because she stopped crying and started to actually listen to him, as opposed to merely hearing me when I had my go at her.

When I asked K where he’d gotten the 3Ps after we’d put both girls to bed, he said that he just knew them. I know he could not have gotten them from any motivational book, since he only reads graphic novels and comics – clearly a textbook case of an uneducated non-graduate. The only source of his inspiration must have been the knocks he’s taken as someone who started at the very bottom of the food chain, fresh out of national service, and worked very, very hard for everything he has today.

Head knowledge through books and development aids is one thing. K knows the importance of diligence and perseverance, and can teach the children about these values better than I ever could. He’s a better parent than I am, because he has more heart knowledge than I do. That’s something a graduate parent will never learn in university. And our children are better off for it.

It also occurs to me that if I keep going down this path, there will come a time when my daughters will no longer want to come to me to tell me about their hopes and fears and problems, because they fear that I will judge them – not based on the facts, but based on my own worldview. They will gloss over the finer details of their lives, because they don’t want to hear about how they have made a wrong choice, and how they will regret it in time to come. They will not want to live with me, because the proximity means that all their foibles will be right under my nose. Oh, they might still have dinner with me or go on holiday with me once in a while, but they will keep the fear of Mother in their hearts even as they try to find joy in being with me. They would rather seek help from strangers than come to me. And they will not want to seem anything other than successful because to seem like a normal human being who experiences failure and makes mistakes would expose them to possible aspersions, cast by me.

They will decide to do all these things because I have used the frustrations of my own life to frustrate them.

So for as long as I’m their mother, I will tread carefully the fine line between mothering and being overbearing, or risk destroying my bond with them altogether. I might never understand them or the generation they live in, but I’ll sure as hell try.

I don’t want my children to be lost to me, because of me.

Isn’t personal experience such a rich mine ?

Frankly, I can never understand why some people feel the need to pity people who choose not to have kids, or to denigrate their decision to be childless. Having children is not fun. In fact, it is a downright pain in the ass punctuated occasionally by happy and proud moments. From the time you find out you are pregnant, you go through a whole host of discomforts – from having ultrasound wands, forceps, speculums and a whole host of medieval torture implements shoved up your hoo-hoo in the name of making sure the baby is OK, to putting up with night feeds and colics, tantrums, mouthing-off and attitude-showing. It really is no walk in the park, and it makes me wonder why I chose to have not one but two, TWO, kids. Whose arrivals, by the way, put me in worlds of pain because they had to be cut from my belly.

Children are not a necessity. If you think about it, we have nearly seven billion people on this earth. Maybe one couple adding one or two won’t make a difference, but if all seven billion of us procreate, there’s sure to be problems. And don’t even get me started about people like the Duggars who apparently have never heard of birth control. You can trot out your Bible and other religious or philosophical texts to substantiate the view the children are a blessing, are needed for continuity of the human race, for economic purposes etc, but when you really think about it, we no longer farm our land, the planet is going to hell in a hand basket, and prices are shooting up so rapidly that at the end of the day, children are more of a burden than anything else.

So I get why some people don’t want to have kids. I really do. I love my children to bits, but they are not essential in defining my worth as a human being. In fact, with them, I stumble more than I succeed because I have to try so hard to be a good mother, worker, wife and all the other roles that I have to play, when sometimes the world pisses me off so much that I just want to fling things around and scream and shout and stamp my feet.  It’s amazing to me that other parents – who presumably have gone through the same travails that I have as a parent – don’t seem to feel the same way. Worse, they feel the need to proselytise parenting to people who have already decided that having children is an option, not a compulsion.