Turning up the temperature of the hothouse

Singaporean parents are the most kiasu parents in the world.

Ok, that's a statement I have no statistical data to support. I just know it. Deep in my gut. It goes against all my training in empirical research. But I stand by it and I vouch for it. All great methods of proving a hypothesis, I know but well...

How do I know this?

Example 1.
I've had to enrol my children in kindergarten/ nursery even though they are still pre-verbal. The wait list is about 6 classes long so I'm guessing it's close to impossible to get them in. And I've had to put them on the wait list and pay 100 bucks just for that glimmer of hope that 66 kids drop out of the morning session and 34 kids out of the afternoon session. I want to put them in that kinder, not so much because it was featured in the papers and everyone wants to go there, because it's a good Christian kindergarten, it's nearby enough, the fees aren't exorbitant and they've got great grounds. I wouldn't have thought to ring them and enquire if I wasn't told of the sheer impossibility of getting them into nursery. There's no way this could be logical. I thought it only happened in the US, in NY city where a child is judged by which school he's enrolled in and where the kindergartens hold interviews for the newly- verbal, possibly not even toilet-trained child.

Packrat drew the line at putting them on this kinder's wait list. He said we weren't to be crazy parents that put our kids on the wait list everywhere in the area. I agreed. We'd be broke just paying the registration/application fee. And there wasn't a discount for twins.

Example 2

This morning I was at McDonalds, but of course. It was a rather nice one. It was open air, when you looked out, there's greenery all around. Peaceful. I liked it. What spoilt it for me was this mother sitting in front of me with her child. I think the child was about 5. He was quite happy eating his hotcakes. Everytime I'm at Macs in the morning, I'm always overcome by this need to bring my kids for breakfast there. Not because I want to feed them the type of junk they can produce, but because of what it can potentially represent- alone time with mommy and possibly daddy, just playing and enjoying being out. Unfortunately, this boy wasn't getting that treat. With every bite of the hotcake, he had to respond to flashcards his mother was flashing at him.
And with the drink of his Milo, he got a lesson, a formal lesson, about how water condenses from water droplets onto the outside of his cup. The straw that broke this Mommy's back was when she whipped out some building blocks and got him working on it. I think she had some idea of what she wanted him to build because everytime he tried to join the blocks or stack it in a manner that he wanted them, she stopped and corrected him, trying to teach him to do it some other way. Needless to say, the boy got extremely frustrated. He would fuss and thrash his legs because he didn't know what to do. I came close to going up to her and telling her to stop stressing him out when she grabbed his face, angled it towards her and told him "don't scream, just ask for help". Yes, rational advice, but one to be given to a boy who was obviously upset? I think not. She eventually dragged him off. Probably to Popular, to buy him assessment books.

It irked me no end. I mean, it was breakfast for crying out loud. If she was going to take him to McDonald's as a treat, it should have remained that way, a treat. Fun. Not a working treat. Just like a working holiday is NOT a holiday, neither is a working treat a treat. This mother probably felt that she had to compensate for not spending enough time with him and also not intellectually stimulating him enough. So in order to indulge him and to assuage her own guilt, she brought him out for breakfast. But there was also the need to catch up so that he didn't lose -out because she hadn't time, so multi-task. Breakfast, flashcards, science and a lesson on creativity.

I'd like the twins to be bright and smart and I know a lot of it has got to do with opportunities and experiences but surely there'e a better way of doing it than to do it over breakfast.





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