I’m back again on this new mini-series I started to pen last week. It’s all about what I learned after 15 years of parenting.
Seven days ago, I started this because of a brief exchange I had with a platform editor I collaborated with back in March, which led to an essay on my special needs parenting journey.
We were chatting over WhatsApp about (what else) parenting. Somewhere in the conversation, I let on that this has been a rather challenging year for me, parenting a full-blown teenage boy.
I even went as far as to say that 15 is now my least favorite number!
That’s when it hit me — why not list down 15 things I’ve learned in the course of these past 15 years that I’ve been parenting? Surely with all I’ve experienced, I must have at least 15 (probably more) insights to parse out to young parents just beginning their own journey, right?
What 15 Years Of Parenting Taught Me | Part 2
Well, right or wrong, I presented five of those 15 things last week.
Here today are the next five.
6. Penmanship
Make sure kids keep up with penmanship into adulthood.
Now in his third year in secondary school, my firstborn has been losing needless marks in his exams simply because his teachers can’t read his handwriting!
His mom and I got pretty cross about this ‘waste’ because he used to have lovely, near-flawless handwriting in primary school. I blame the proliferation of digital learning in today’s education curriculum. So little of their daily work in school requires the use of their hands to grasp a pen to write. So without the constant practice that was de rigour back in his primary school days, atrophy has clearly settled in!
Penmanship is about respect for the process and diligence for precision and skill. Not to mention cultivating patience and honing fine motor skills that will have applications in many aspects of daily living. It also encourages more deliberate thought processes, slowing things down and allowing for more creativity and focus compared to the frequently distracting and fast-paced nature of digital typing.
Oh, and it aids memory retention by exercising the part of the brain that retains information.
And isn’t it more meaningful to get a handwritten love note from one’s significant other than a hastily-typed text on your mobile? (I’ll have to remember this if ever my son comes to me for dating advice!)
7. Savings
Admittedly this habit of saving is nothing new.
There are few parents out there (and children for that matter) who don’t appreciate the importance of saving for a rainy day. And so of course by extension, the importance of helping kids learn and form a saving habit from a very young age.
[For greater insights into helping younger kids start a good savings habit, I highly recommend checking out this podcast episode by a great community of stay-at-home dads I’m proud to help pioneer — The Ordinary Dad!]
But I’m realising that if I could turn back the clock now, I would make sure to regularly bring home the message of saving up to my boys, in both direct and indirect ways.
Direct would be of course getting them to save money into a piggy bank placed noticeably in their room as a daily visual reminder. Bringing them periodically to the bank to deposit pocket money they managed to accumulate after deducting expenses like buying canteen food in school or school paraphernalia at the stationery shop.
Indirect would be to openly talk about how our house and home came to be ours — daddy and mommy saving up, getting loans, budgeting, etc — and talking about the role money plays in our economy and society through historical and contemporary news and features we can distill to share with them (age-appropriately of course).
All with the idea of ensuring they never take material possessions and purchasing power as a given. And never to think that we their parents are ATMs, with a never-ending pool of funds to tap out whenever they want!
8. Gigs
Inculcate the importance of paid work once they are old enough. Not just as a way to pass the time, but to build life skills and learn firsthand the importance of hard work and diligent effort.
Even at pre-schooling age, kids can be given simple tasks around the house (recall my previous post where I listed the importance of doing chores) and be “paid” as a way of incentivizing them. Of course at that age, the payment mode need not be purely monetary. It could take the form of a treat they enjoy like ice cream or a movie.
In the case of teens, it’s even more important for them to find meaningful gigs to engage themselves productively and pick up work skills that will prepare them for adulthood. So they understand the value and challenge of hard work and appreciate how parents earn a living and that nothing’s for free.
However just know that, if you’re like me, you may need to put in some effort to source for gigs on behalf of your kid. Especially if, like mine, your kid’s not much of a go-getter or lacks the wherewithal to job search on his own. Ask around. Search online. Trawl the mall to find shop owners and vendors looking for temporary help.
Even turning a regular or one-off household chore into a paid gig for your kid is better than nothing. My family’s moving house in a few months, so part of the packing now is to inventorize my large collection of books. To see what stays or goes. This will be my last resort work for him if he doesn’t find anything else.
I just need to forewarn him Daddy doesn’t pay well!
9. Conversations
The art of conversation is a lost one today. No one should dispute this unfortunate truism. Just look around at the rampant use of digital devices daily. The shorter attention span of folks of all ages. The rise of echo chambers and political polarization. No one’s talking deeply with no one. And don’t even get me started on the art of listening.
If anyone believes this is absolutely NOT a desirable state of affairs, it would have to be parents. I cannot count the number of times I’ve lost my temper repeating myself when talking to my seemingly-deaf children.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
These days, I liken the act of sitting down for a good and meaningful conversation with my sons to watching in slow motion a species going extinct! When they were young, you were their world. They would pay attention, watch your every move, and hang onto your words and wisdom. Most of the time anyway.
But now that they are teens, I’ll be glad to even get a couple of lines into their blocked cochlear on most occasions!
Yet how can I know what goes on in their lives if we never converse?
Unfortunately, as parents, the onus is on us to get creative and consistently find ways to bring our kids into regular times of conversation throughout the day and week. Make full use of things, events, news, and encounters that happen daily to spark discussions and mutual exchanges. Be prepared to fail more than succeed.
But keep at it. Or risk isolation.
One example to get conversations going is the final learning point I have for today…
10. Mealtimes
Growing up, I hated family mealtimes. Yes, that’s right, I hated it.
I had a domineering father who liked to monopolize family meal times by lecturing us ad nauseum. So no surprise that as we grew older, my siblings and I would find ways and means to get out of sitting down together to eat as a family.
Thankfully, I married someone who had the opposite experience growing up. My wife’s often instrumental in steering our little family to sit down at the dinner table to talk about our day.
Even then, it does get more challenging as the kids grow older. For one thing, my eldest is usually home late from school and he would much rather catch up on his Netflix Japanese anime shows than join us for meals. I too am often guilty of falling back into my old ways and watching my shows or wolfing down my meal so I can go do my stuff.
But I’m coming around to realizing now that, at the very least, one or two dinners per week should find us all seated together eating, enjoying one another’s company.
With no devices.
Only conversations.
See you next week for my final five learning points these past 15 years of parenting.
