Parenting Philosophy

I've seen Jack Sim being featured on The Straits Times on many occassions. Today, another exclusive of him was shown in the Life section. For those who are clueless who Jack Sim is, remember all your 5-star toilets in various hawker centres around the heartlands of Singapore - and that is just the tip of the iceberg of the work he's done.

The reason why I've paid so much attention to this amazing guy is not because of my obsession with toilets or the fact that he's old(see some of you sniggering while reading this), rather, I've had the privilege of being classmates with his oldest daughter during my Primary school years, without knowing that I was given the grandest of opportunities to interact with her.

For someone to name his children after the simplest virtues in the world, i.e. Faith, Earth, Worth & Truth, there's bound to be something very interesting about this person.

Excerpts from the article in Life that were very inspiring to me:

"Let children be free, let them do what they like. Teach them basic values, teach them honest and audacity. Teach them to be polite but not too polite, so they can speak up." - His take on parenting philosophy. "I hug them, talk rubbish with them and joke. Of course, I sometimes have to do this through Facebook."

"Thrift is very important," he says with a laugh. "I used to think that a businessman must wear a Rolex watch, have a Montblanc pen, join a country club, so I went to get it all. Then after that, you know what happened? So strange, my status didn't change at all."

I vaguely remember her oldest daughter, Faith, always being very outspoken in class, daring to voice her opinions, and going against the conventions of what defines a girl. She pursues what she believes in, be it in studies, or hobbies. And now, I finally see the dots all connecting.

She wasn't the most well-liked by classmates because of her outspoken and unconventional character and we were all biased little children judging her by her thin frail frame, but that is only because we were too young to appreciate this side of her. If only I had been enlightened when I had been much younger. Now it really teaches me to never judge a book by its cover because I had this bias against her as well as she was abnormally thin and tall and didn't look like the rest of the normal kids(only then I realised she has her dad genes, take a look at his NS photo featured in the monday interview).

Believe it or not, I have a memory of a particular conversation I had with Faith in Primary school, where she took out a car that resembled a toilet bowl, and went "my dad's a crazy toiletman, he has this insane love for toilet bowls."

I laughed in response, oblivious to the start of a ground-breaking advancement made in terms of the standards of sanitation around the globe.