Parental Guidance
chingl@sph.com.sg
LAST Monday, just before she left for school, my daughter nipped into my room
and handed me a note.
"Mom, ple come back from work. Ple!" She means "pls", but I understood it well
enough.
I had been on night duty on Sunday, and did not kiss her good night.
I looked at the agitated scrawl on the small piece of paper. "Mun mun," I
began, using her name in Cantonese.
"Oh, forget it," she said, and flounced from the room.
It took a moment for that comment to register, especially since I heard myself
in her "forget it". How did she learn to get the intonation just right?
And why do my kids run away every time I try to reason with them?
My son, 4, sometimes covers his ears and yells "Mum! Stop talking ? you are
killing my ears!"
All the books I read tell us that parenting is a matter of communicating with
your children, explaining the facts to them, letting them see that your
decisions are reasonable and logical.
You can't be capricious or dictatorial about things. If you want your children
to behave in a certain way, you have to explain to them why.
But I sometimes wonder whether all this is backfiring on me. My husband, who
almost never explains, seems to get the children to mind him well enough.
"Into the car," he orders and it is done.
"Into the car," I order, and they dawdle. "Into the car, please," I say again.
And they look at me and giggle.
"Why?" my son asks innocently.
"Because we are going to school, and if we don't, we will be late. And mum will
be late because you are so slow in getting ready."
"But mum, we don't need to go to school," he says. ?We can play at home!"
This continues until I bundle him and his sister into the backseat.
What's the best way to make kids mind you?
This question becomes less academic as Fung, 18months, is coming into his
terrible twos.
In the past, he would smile sweetly whether you said "bathe", "change" or
"let's go!". Now, he gives input - usually, it is a yell of protest, much like
his brother's.
What children learn, they will lob back at you, I thought.

MY SPECIAL TOUR
But it's fun to see what they make of the world. If I am quiet, if I just let
my children look at the world, I am like a passenger in a very special tour -
like a tourist on Planet Earth.
Minh likes to walk among the mature trees near our house, collecting red seeds
from the ground.
"How shiny they are!" she marvels.
Yung likes watching the tadpoles in our big pot of water plants turn into
frogs. "What do frogs eat?" he wonders.
Fung loves dogs. He stares and laughs at our neighbour's dog, an excitable
little thing who barks his head off each time we walk by. When we drive to
school in the mornings, we sometimes see a great Dane - a gray giant of a dog -
along Holland Road. That sends the young ones in the backseat into paroxysms of
delight.
If I were alone with my husband, we would have missed it. One of us would have
been sending e-mail on our Blackberries, talking about the stock market,
complaining about the in-laws.
We would have missed the red seeds, tadpoles and Great Danes, missed half the
world around us.
"You make mummy rich, you know that?" I told my daughter.
That didn't need any explaining, as she smiled and hugged me tight.