He was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and drinking heavily. He stopped attending school, did not sit for his exams and was on the verge of getting expelled.

His parents tried speaking to him themselves and getting counsellors to talk to him, but nothing worked. They finally took him to the Juvenile Court to declare him Beyond Parental Control (BPC).

His mother, Mrs Lee, still remembers the month he spent there. "We would get to see him for only 30 minutes a week. I could not stop crying when I went to meet him. It was hard to look him in the eye," she said.

Dr Carol Balhetchet of the Singapore Children's Society believes children often get out of hand because of over-indulgence and "too much freedom".

Mrs Lee agrees. Once Gerrard was in secondary school, she thought he was "mature enough to tell right from wrong" and gave him the freedom to make his own decisions. She now regrets it because it made him pick the wrong path.

Gerrard said: "I wanted to be cool and these people were the popular gang in my area. I thought I could study and be a gangster at the same time. I was naive and did not understand why my parents had a problem with that."

Mrs Lee said Gerrard became impatient and angry whenever she tried to stop him associating with them. But it was not until things went out of hand that the parents took the "hard decision" and Gerrard was sent to the boys' home on 28 Dec last year.

She now feels that if she had been more patient and they had communicated better, things might have turned out differently.

Said Gerrard: "The one month I spent there gave me time to reflect on the things that went wrong.

"Although I was initially angry with my parents, I realised I had been led astray by the wrong company."

He agreed with his mother that "if we had spoken about things instead of being angry with each other, we could have sorted things out".

This article was first published in The New Paper on Mar 19, 2008.