Stories For My Children

No doubt it's a public holiday today but old habit dies hard. So, as usual, I woke up early in the morning. However I didn't need to rush to school. Hence I could afford the luxury of leisure reading before breakfast. And so it seems to be so.... It was only ten minutes into the content of my latest purchase, 'David and Goliath' by Malcom Gladwell that I came across the author talking about poverty being stressful and exhaustive and parents struggling to make ends meet with multiple jobs will probably have no time to tell bed time stories for their children. BED TIME STORY-It rang like powerful trigger that transported my mind back to years ago when my children were still young. Yes, BED TIME STORY! That was what I did, cooking up stories as fast as my sons could enquire 'what's next' in the darkness of their room brightened slightly by a low power blue coloured bulb. Picking up some fictitious characters that fascinated me when I was young but added salt and sugar and more modern context without any regard for logic and reality. Now that my mind is oriented towards sharing this experience.

Was I very free then? Surely not. Besides teaching, fetching children, teaching extra classes and writing books I tried my best to spare some time a few nights per week for this special bed time story session. So I think and I hope parents irrespective of ranks and positions outside the house should be just normal parents at home. Their children have the same needs as just any other children. What I can see is a lot of problems of teenagers are partly due to lack of care and communication with their children.

Talking about stories that defies logic and unrealistic I would like to say that it is a way to provoke imagination and thinking. It should be fun, with fantasy besides being moralistic. Too much of hard logic and rules of the adult world will spoil the innocent childhood of a kid and hasten him to a less colourful world. Looking back it is also a good start to train the kids creative and critical thinking at a very young age and most importantly, in a indirect way. Imagine telling a kid directly...Now I am going to teaching critical thinking, creative thinking and higher order thinking skills. ...This will surely be the fastest way to trigger a mechanism in the mind of the child to shut off. This is one mistake many so called educationists make. Don't you think so?

Thinking back it was also a good training for me. A training that helps me in my present job that exposes me to all kinds of surprises and uncertainties that require me to adapt, adjust and act fast. Those days I challenged myself to think and act fast to the challenges of my two sons who couldn't wait for me to create my story on the spot and yet to tell it like an old story that had been told umpteen times. Of course Kiat and Tatt know what I writing now but Yun who slept in a seperate room missed all the fun. Anyway, till today I am still not too sure whether Yun, being a girl, would have enjoyed this kind of dragons, sword fighting and funny giant stories had she been together when the father was cooking up all these funny tales.....

I got to admit one thing: If the story was meant to make them sleep faster and earlier, I failed miserably. But that was never my intention to do so. Till today I do not know how long they took to calm and settle down for a good sleep after the excitement with stories like a boy and a girl being chased by dragons and monsters in a dark cave.... until each of them found one half of a ring that when joined together with the simultaneous shout of the name SUZANE to make the giant genie named Suzane to appear and helped to defeat the enemies...... Anyway however indirect it could be it was always about the good defeating the bad.

While writing this I still have the feeling of fun, pride and satisfaction of those days. One reason I write this is share and hopefully more parents will pick up bed time story telling as a hobby or at least an obligation....all the more now. ...to let young kids feel that besides Youtube or DVD parents also can tell story and even more interactive than the most advanced multimedia system in the world.