Raising Parents: Myth of the Perfect Parent

By Louisa Ch'ng

We all have our own parenting journeys - full of laughter and tears, late night snuggling and early morning trainings, exam prep and fun musicals. Along this journey, we as parents face so many questions! How do we raise our girls to be strong, guilt free women? How to raise visionary, ambitious, respectful boys? How to be a mum and still have a life?

This collection of stories tries to capture perspectives from Stay at Home Mums vs. Career Mums, perspectives from the West vs the East, perspectives from Tiger Mums vs the more chilled Mums. Women who have scaled the heights in the academia and the corporate worlds only to face the challenge of putting a baby to sleep and teaching an 8 year-old Singapore maths. Ranging in age from early thirties to mid-fifties and scattered across the globe from Singapore to London to Silicon Valley and to Queenstown; these mums reflect a spectrum of different upbringing - from Malaysian Peranakan roots to British boarding schools; with voices from Chinese, French, American and Russian families. The result is an honest and heartfelt glimpse of parenthood today.


*** Special section included on the parenting journeys of dads

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543760705

Louisa Ch'ng

Louisa Ch’ng started off her career as a management consultant and discovered her passion in education after having her firstborn. Holding a law degree from Cambridge University and a MBA from Wharton Business School, she definitely loves her books and believes in researching her parenting questions through the library, internet, coffee chats & drinks with her friends. Though Malaysian at heart, she lives in Singapore with her long-suffering but supportive husband and three children.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Louisa Ch’ng.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5437-6069-9

                eBook            978-1-5437-6070-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

Acknowledgements

I would like to dedicate this book to my parents who have always been there for me and have always encouraged me to chase after the rainbows. It would be remiss of me if I do not mention my appreciation for my husband, my partner in raising the 3 protagonists in our parenting story. Admittedly we have very different parenting styles but his love for them and me makes his other foibles forgivable.

Last but not least, this book is dedicated to all my generous friends, the mums and dads who were willing to share their stories. A special call out to my talented friend Naomi Sim who painted the lovely book cover which captures the beautiful landscape of our parenting journey.

Myth of the Perfect Parent!

We hear from experts all the time – we read books written by professors with PhDs aplenty – and yes we should learn from them. But as we realise from our science classes, effective learning needs to be a balance of theory and practice. Thus I thought to myself, shouldn’t we listen to the stories from the actual practitioners – the parents who are facing the struggles every day, the ones making the parenting decisions, the ones weighing the pros and cons of each alternate path taken.

The idea for this book came from all the mummy breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks that I have been to. Those forums were also where I hear the best parenting stories – from cool advice to witty comments to shared grievances. And I realise we all have our own parenting stories to tell… perspectives from Stay at Home Mums vs. Career Mums, perspectives from the West vs the East, perspectives from Tiger Mums vs Elephant Mums.

These stories are from a group of women whom I deeply admire, from girls who I met since I was ten to friends I made across the Pacific. Women who have scaled the heights in the academia and the corporate worlds only to face the challenges of putting a baby to sleep and teaching an 8 year-old Singapore Maths. We exchange stories on how to raise girls to be strong, guilt free women; and how to raise visionary, ambitious, respectful boys. (There is a section later on from the Dads too!!!)

As a parent, we all seek perfection – not necessarily in our children but definitely in ourselves. We all want to be the perfect parent, the best parent one can be to provide the best for our children. But we do make mistakes, we do take a glass of wine after a long day of parenting, we do hide in the bathroom when our kids are looking for us (or at least I do!). We make mistakes, we are human… we just don’t want our kids to know that.

In my own parenting journey, I have struggled with a few of these questions below…

• Nature vs. nurture – how much control/influence do we have over our child’s development?

• Playdates – best friendship tool or a waste of time?

• Academics – how do we think about grades? How important are they and how much focus should we give go them?

• Rat race – competition – how best to prepare my child?

• Values – what values and how should I instill them?

I hope that the stories from these amazing women will make us feel less alone in our parenting pursuit of excellence. I hope you laugh along with me when I realised that no matter how much I tried to dissuade my little girl from wanting to wear only dresses – she would look at me and say why mummy? You do that all the time? I hope you understand my angst when my sons have a more active social life than I do and I become their unwitting PA arranging playdates. I hope the struggle of balancing between the focus on academics and the need to preserve our kids’ childhood Will resonate. And lastly, the hope we feel for our children will be the bond that ties us together in our parenting journeys.

Contents

My story

Stories from those with whom I grew up

Rude Awakening – Jasmin Thum

Babbles at Bedtime – Dr. Ratna Rajaratnam

To My Dear Kai – Koon Pek Ng

What happens when East meets West? – Emily Ong*

When Life Interferes with your Plans – Elizabeth Jenn Ng

Stories from friends when we were busy trying to have it all

Nature, Nurture & Notice – Meredith Ngo

The Conflicted Parent – Jay Tee

When did Parenting require a Degree from Juilliard – Ei Mynn Loo

Mummyhood Learnings – Yingshan Wu

Raising an Adult – Dr. Cheryl Lee

Stories from friends forged through motherhood

Learning to be a Mum – Sandy Xu

Russian Tea – Dr. Yulia Sorokina

Raising Girls – Chi-Ling Looi

Embrace failure – Annie McGrath

Bringing up Bebe (French-style in Singapore) – Clémence Jacques*

Perspectives – Patricia*

Parenting during Lockdown – Vyda Chai

Our partner in parenting crime – stories from Dads

A dad who is present is a child’s gift – Lye Yu Min

A surprise in every step – Gerald Lee

Finding one’s own path – Mark Woo*

Afterword

My story

I did not know how to be a mum when Zachary first arrived. Many first time mums probably feel that way… but I was pretty naïve and idealistic. I was a management consultant at that time, jumping on a plane every Sunday night and returning only to Singapore on Friday evenings. I thought that I could have it all – a new baby and my all-consuming career. My close friends could attest to me calling Zac my blob and how I would actually end up working the whole week without seeing my son till the weekend.

Truthfully, I felt disconnected initially – I had read all the baby books during my pregnancy – from The Contented Little Baby Book (CLB) by Gina Ford to The Attachment Parenting by Seuss, so I thought that the moment my baby arrived, I would feel like a mum immediately and parenting would come naturally. I have to admit that I was a slow learner – it would take me a year to realise that my baby was closer to his nanny than to me… that he probably thought his nanny was his mum. How could he not? She was the one who put him to bed, played with him and fed him daily. I was the awkward lady who he saw on weekends. I was too busy running after my promotion – somehow I had believed that the promotion before age 30 was meant to be the badge of achievement I needed.

I have always wondered if our child is a product of our genetics or our upbringing – the age old nature vs nurture question. I think if I only had a single child, I might think that we as parents have a huge influence over how our child turns out. However, when my second son came – I realized that even though two children came from the same set of parents – they could turn out very differently. Is this because we parent them differently or is it because of the innate difference in each child or a mixture of both reasons?

Like in many books, what comes first and foremost is always the characters. In my life, at first glance, the stars in my life seem to be simple archetypes. The first born. The middle child. The baby. But the longer my parenting journey goes, the more complex the characters’ motivations and personalities become. I realized that sooner than I thought, my children are no longer my experiments… they have become the directors of their own lives.

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The first born – my blob, the perfectionist and my little professor!

How he grew from my blob to being Project Zac?

As Zac was my first born, he was the one who helped me figure out what kind of mum I wanted to be. One of the biggest questions we had as first time parents was which education system we wanted to place him in? (This might give you an inkling what kind of parents we are if the main question we had was on schooling and not on food/sleep/citizenship ;))

Our options were either in an international education system (IB, British, US, Australian curriculum) or in the local Asian education system. Many of us are familiar with the pros and cons of both education systems; and they are thoroughly debated in many Asian parenting forums (so no judgment on the choices each of us makes). Having gone through the local Asian education system (in Malaysia) and thinking the grass is always greener, we signed Zac up for an international IB school in Singapore.

I wanted my child to have a love of learning where even at the age of 5, one of Zac’s questions was where does life originate from? Don’t get me wrong, the Asian in me was thinking I am paying thousands of dollars for him to go to a school where he gets to play the whole day… but I had drunk the kool-aid and had embraced the ethos that a child learns best through play. We had signed up for:

- Virtues – a belief that our children will need values instilled in them both in school and at home to succeed in life (values ranging from perseverance to creativity to integrity)

- Love of learning – where our child does not dampen his inquisitiveness but where it is the interest in finding out the answers for himself that fuels his school days

- Exposure and a holistic education – where the playing of sports or playing a lead role in a musical is as central as scoring A’s in class tests

I have to admit it – I loved it… I love the Celebration of Learnings, the Christmas plays, the Easter egg roll, the swim galas.

However, we struggle with the perennial question is this enough? Will my child still be able to deal with stress and to compete with children who have been trained to take exams since they were 3? The academic pressures, the rat race… The issue was too big for me to have a comprehensive answer for… so my answer was maths!

I had faith that the school would teach my child to inquire, to learn and to make friends (making friends is a huge topic for me – which I will write about in my next character story). Thus I needed to teach my son discipline, hard work and a results-driven approach. I chose maths to be my route to impart this teaching. From the time Zac was 4, we started counting, analyzing and the dreaded words – using worksheets. International schools teach maths with manipulatives and creative games – I used the old, time-tested worksheets… and I lucked out… Zac did not resist my attempts and maths became one of the ways we would bond. It was also my way of showing him certainty in life (1+1=2), the fundamentals of practice (drills and drills to achieve full marks) and that nothing is insurmountable if you were willing to work hard at it.

By now, my friends have named my parenting attempts Project Zac – I had slowly shifted my energy from work into parenting my child – my new challenge!

The perfectionist – why sports is the avenue we chose to teach him how to win and lose gracefully?

As Zac grew, we realized that he was a little perfectionist – we applauded it at first – the will to win! But then he would cry at games whenever he loses. And we were worried about him not learning how to lose gracefully – all the literature I was voraciously consuming told us that children needed the opportunity to make mistakes and to fail. Failures are the best way to learn.

Thus, we settled on sports to be our learning tool. This is strange as I was not a sporty person growing up and hardly even watched sports on TV. But it is the best forum for where winning and losing goes hand in hand. A footballer has to continue playing even after the opposite team scores a goal, the game is never over – there will always be the next 5 minutes, the second half, the next game, the next tournament. Sports became our language to reinforce the values that come with overcoming failure – grit, perseverance and determination.

So just like every new age parent, we allowed Zac to try different sports – from football, golf, swimming… and of course he wanted to pursue all. Each sport taught him something – from teamwork needed in football, to the mental strength needed for golf games but swimming became his competitive play. I became one of the "soccer