Parents can be so protective these days.
Kind of understandable but what I witnessed the other day on the MRT made me shake my head.
It was a weekday morning and as I stepped on to a crowded MRT train, I happened to see a girl who looked like a Secondary 1 student(well, I recognised her uniform to be one from a famous SAP school in the west)with someone whom I assumed was her mother.
Seemingly normal situation.
What the mother was doing did not seem that way to me.
She was perhaps on her way to work after sending her daughter off to school and on top of her own bag, she was also carrying her daughter's.
To top it all up, she was huddled around the 12 or 13-year-old kid, hand resting ever so protectively on her shoulder, as if she would be abducted by a strange man.
Oh, come on....
That phrase rang continuously in my head. She's no longer a defenceless, clueless kid fresh out of kindergarten into primary school but a 12-year-old who has just completed PSLE, who understands algebra, fractions, percentages, the concept of centre of gravity, knows how to distinguish between harmful and harmless insects and plants and the like.
And perhaps already starting to have a liking towards guys.
The cynical would probably say to me that it is the first few days of school and her mother was just probably sending her to school to make sure she doesn't get lost and all that.
Understandable, but is it really necessary to have to carry her schoolbag for her? And stand over her daughter as if she is still a bright-eyed toddler?
I remembered taking the bus by myself to class the moment I entered secondary school. No parents, no one to carry my stuff and all that.
Heck, if I were that girl, I would definitely cringe in embarrassment if my mum or dad would insist on helping me with my load.
That brings me to something.
Maybe I am just stubborn with too much pride.
Too much pride that I am not willing to ask for help even if that was really necessary and seemingly the only way out.
Perhaps I have been too caught up in my own world for too long to really appreciate the meaning of teamwork and working together, helping one another.
I don't really know.
Kind of understandable but what I witnessed the other day on the MRT made me shake my head.
It was a weekday morning and as I stepped on to a crowded MRT train, I happened to see a girl who looked like a Secondary 1 student(well, I recognised her uniform to be one from a famous SAP school in the west)with someone whom I assumed was her mother.
Seemingly normal situation.
What the mother was doing did not seem that way to me.
She was perhaps on her way to work after sending her daughter off to school and on top of her own bag, she was also carrying her daughter's.
To top it all up, she was huddled around the 12 or 13-year-old kid, hand resting ever so protectively on her shoulder, as if she would be abducted by a strange man.
Oh, come on....
That phrase rang continuously in my head. She's no longer a defenceless, clueless kid fresh out of kindergarten into primary school but a 12-year-old who has just completed PSLE, who understands algebra, fractions, percentages, the concept of centre of gravity, knows how to distinguish between harmful and harmless insects and plants and the like.
And perhaps already starting to have a liking towards guys.
The cynical would probably say to me that it is the first few days of school and her mother was just probably sending her to school to make sure she doesn't get lost and all that.
Understandable, but is it really necessary to have to carry her schoolbag for her? And stand over her daughter as if she is still a bright-eyed toddler?
I remembered taking the bus by myself to class the moment I entered secondary school. No parents, no one to carry my stuff and all that.
Heck, if I were that girl, I would definitely cringe in embarrassment if my mum or dad would insist on helping me with my load.
That brings me to something.
Maybe I am just stubborn with too much pride.
Too much pride that I am not willing to ask for help even if that was really necessary and seemingly the only way out.
Perhaps I have been too caught up in my own world for too long to really appreciate the meaning of teamwork and working together, helping one another.
I don't really know.
posted by morningcalm @ 4:43 AM
1 Comments:
At 5:42 PM,
stardust979 said…
Gawd I'm bored and brain burnt from reading the whole day!! Muar said he wrote something so I come in to see what stuff he wrote, har har. Considering brain is beyond repair w not be responsible for what's going to be written! :o And it's Friday so no holds barred!
This is very interesting. Trying to think abt what I learnt back at NIE abt children...cld be an extreme example of mollycoddling (is that the right term?). The kid will hate it. Don't all adolescent girls. Furthermore, they think and hope to function like adults at that age. However, I don't blame the parents because personally, my parents were like that when I was very younger and often bullied by a much much older female sibling, though by 13 I was thoroughly ignored hahaha~ ;) But I took public transport P4 onwards for a while and it was great, after gymnastics class. THEN I started to rebel and wanted to be alone, but that's normal. At least I thought so! Singapore's parents are amazingly getting either more protective (judging from complaints we get everyday and the 'taopok' incident concerning some great school in the north..:))...or nonchalant (from the neglect cases in poorer schools)...so I'm not too surprised to see these things in an affluent society as ours.
Remembered teaching at two schools, two extremes. One had a parent who would call us up everyday to watch over her 17 YEAR OLD child (!). A brilliant kid but psychologically tearing. Kinda think it was the mom that set the kid off that way. The other was a case I handled concerning a 13 year old music student who was latchkey also psychological and burnt and broke lamp posts and stuff. As a teacher I was always very frustrated and cracking my head as to how to help the kid, and would be abit annoyed at the parents. But eventually I realised some things can't be helped. For all we know, each family has their own personal areas that we may never know of...
If I wasn't in the education line, and if I were in that train staring at that scene, I would just have put it off as simply over-protectiveness and would naturally think the parent is at fault. But despite having been on the ground for 3.5 years and seeing two extremes of behaviour, I'll always see two ends of it. And the most heart-wrenching thing is, the cases...are never a pretty sight.
Over-worried parents shld read "catcher in the rye"... :)
Weekend is here, yup it was only a week ago we all met. Here's to friendship and Mel's very thought-provoking blog... :)
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