That is somewhat true I think.. cos while it is true that children truly do care about their parent's presence, in my case, presents are important too:) wahahahaha.... maybe not as important as my presence.. but important:)
Ever since we returned from Singapore, I noticed that Ace seems to be constantly in sort of a bad mood. He is whiny and he doesnt seem to want to listen to instructions anymore.. anything you tell him to do, he will do the opposite right on purpose. When he comes to doing homework, he will cry and dream and just come out with every trick in his book to make me vomit blood and I wondered why this is so.
I gave it a thought and I realized that ever since our return back to Dubai, I haven't been really spending quality time with him. Because I was sick, I was only functioning at like a basic minimum everyday. I could hardly chat with him and couldn't even read story books for him at night before we slept like I usually do when we are in Dubai. And even when I talk to him, I am not really present... I am just functioning and reacting. And in our last week in Singapore, we were so caught up with doing all the things we wanted to do in the last leg of our trip that I din really get to spend much time with him alone too.
My teacher in the psychology workshop that I attend (called POV) told us that as parents, we always tend to create a distance between us at our children in the day when we say ignore them, or hurt their feelings, or scream at them, etc.... Because our children are young now, they are not able to "fight back" as they are still reliant on our care. But they will accumulate these and as they grow up, you will see them becoming more and more rebellious and talking back at us, etc... And there is a way we can go around this and not have rebellious kids when they are in their teens and gain more independence:)
The way is to "join" with them and bridge the distance that we create in the day with all the possible parenting mistakes we might have made. Every night, if you can spare 20 minutes to join with your kids, it will be a great way to erase all the wrongs of the day and bridge the distance.. joining could be as simple as you reading a book to them.. or anything tat allows you to bond with each other. If they are already asleep by the time you reach home, patting them.. holding on to them or hugging them while sending love is a form of joining too. And the creation of this bond also will make the kid feel safe when you are not with them. This sense of strong bonding and security will mean our kids won't have that much of a separation anxiety and they will be ok and happy even if we are not with them.
Anyway, since I made this realization, I thought I better do something about it and thus for the next two days, when I started to recover from my flu and found the energy, i spent time with Ace and really found a chance to be PRESENT with him. I read him a story book and spent some time chatting with him. And whenever I got him to do homework. I always sat down beside him to go through the work with him on the spot and had my attention 100% focused on him.
Miracles of miracles!:) After two days, Ace made a 360degrees turnabout!:) He was suddenly happy, chirpy and polite. He stopped whining for no reason, stopped wetting himself in bed even! He even started to enjoy doing extra homework and could pay attention over a longer period and he even joked with me about it... (We have alternate chinese days and math days.. chinese days are a little tougher and if he doesnt pay attention to me and even after explaining 5 times, he still doesnt seem to understand, I will complain tat I am going to vomit blood... so on chinese day that day, he said, "Oh no, mummy.. today you are going to vomit blood.. cos it is CHINESE DAY today!" and giggled. Thank god though that he was doing great tat day and I got to save my blood ;))
I am happy that after some consistent hard work, he is now able to do many of those story sums in the math assesment books I bought from Singapore without my help:) He is also able to write many chinese words and recognize even more of them.
The other day, while he was chatting with me and complaining about something that happened in school he actually went, "真不知道是怎么搞的.." which was a pleasant surprise for me... that 1) he volunteered to speak mandarin 2) it was a proper mandarin phrase and 3) he got it in the right context! ;) Now, our favourite car ride activity is to name something in english and let Ace name it in mandarin:)
Anyway, I just wanted to share this good reminder I got from Ace lah.. that all your children ever want is your love and your attention. Have you been paying your child enough attention?:)
PS: Since we are on the topic of learning mandarin, I was just giving him a prep talk the other day about the importance of learning chinese while I tested Ace on the mandarin phrases we learnt today during study time.
Me: you have to work on Chinese and be good at it... Just like mummy... Then you can translate books like me...
Ace: If your Chinese is so good, why are you always using google translate??
Me: ???!!!!!
Sigh.... If only he is as quick in the mind when it comes to his math, timestable and chinese homework!:)
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