Just a couple of days back, I received a bill shock for my handphone and I am still reeling in pain from it. But I have no one but myself to blame for it.
It all started when I went for a short weekend overseas getaway with my friends. All was happy and gay until I received a call from office. What I should have done there and then was to tell the caller that I am overseas and they should call somebody that is back home. Maybe because of some misplaced notion of responsibility or something like that coupled with not reading the rates of calling from that place, I continued to answer the call and tried to troubleshoot the problem for a good 20 odd minutes which eventually still needed somebody back home to do some intervention.
All in all, the total damage from this 20 odd minutes is 80 plus bucks. An expensive lesson learnt. When on holiday be on holiday.
Parenting is a journey not a destination. Successful parenting is not finding a suitable parenting style for a kid and then just continuously using it. But rather, it is to change styles to adapt to the kid as he or she is begins a different phase of their life.
Most parents, usually older asian parents, prefer to adopt a paternalistic style of parenting. Nothing wrong with that. It is a style that comes most naturally to most parents and it is pretty effective most of the time especially with young kids. Paternalistic parenting entails parents telling what the kid should and or should not be doing, which is great when the kid is young, because it gives them a compass as to where is the "correct" direction they should be going towards. But as the kid becomes an adult, this style of parenting may cause some "problems".
For a fact, parents are going to have more life experience compared to their kids. But being an adult, the kid would want to be empowered to solve their own problems. And having more experience as parents compared to their kids just mean exactly that. It does not dimish the kid's capability in dealing with their own problems.
So unless of course the kid is doing something that is gravely wrong that needs immediate correction, as a paternalistic parent, instead of saying "You should/should not do this this this.", why not try saying "What do you think if this this this is being/not being done." or just "I think this this this should/should not be done.". Let the kid know your opinions but let him or her come to their own decision. And for all you know, now the parent's opinion is taken more into the kid's decisions, which is what the parents had wanted to achieve but initally failed because of their parenting styles.
After a year long absence, I am finally writing again!
There were many reasons why I stopped writing, some were situational, some were personal. But I will leave what these reasons are for maybe another post. So why am I writing again? Quite simply, because "someone" said something nice about my posts. Of course prior to that, I already had some inclination to start writing again but was waffling a bit. Her words were just the extra motivation I needed to get started again.
Looking back at my previous posts, I must say most of it are just rants. Feelings and thoughts that I had without much or any critical thinking at all. This time round, I would like to publish posts that have more substance in it whether it is feelings or thoughts or just topics of interests. So I have decided to remove all my previous posts and starting from this post, I hope to achieve what I set out to achieve when I decided to start writing again.