Come and join us on 21 April at Saujana Janda Baik to for a fun and memorable morning of photography and learning!

Starting at 8.30 AM, breakfast will be provided and we will also be having a “Tips With The Pro” session to enhance your photography skills further! The best photos will stand a chance to win a 2D1N stay at Saujana Janda Baik! Tickets are only RM10 and are limited – register now and save 10%!

To REGISTER and FOR MORE INFO, please go to: contest page.

You might have read of many ways on how to teach a child to be patient. However, there is one way that experts agree is THE BEST, THE SMARTEST and THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY to teach kids to be patient. It’s called ROLE MODELING.

It’s good to remember that kids hear what you say but follow what you do. Simply said, kids like to copy. For kids who have mums and dads, they’ll naturally copy what their mums and dads do. Because of this, I’d like to share with you what I learnt from my late father about patience. Like you, I have read quite a bit about being patient, but I can vouch that till today, the lessons that I learnt from my late father are the most powerful.

Let me tell you a little bit about my father. The interesting thing about him was that he was rarely around. He was by all accounts an absent father. Well, almost. He was never present during my cousins’ weddings, family get-togethers, family dinners, even funerals of loved ones. About the only time he was home was late in the evening. But even then, he would be so exhausted to talk or entertain his family.

Oh, yes. Other than that, there was Hari Raya, the only time he would make a brief appearance for the entire year. Even then, it was only for a few hours to allow him to go to the mosque for the Eid Prayer. Then he would rush home, change into working gear and get back to work. This was expected of my father. You see, my father was a bus-driver. He had what people call a ‘blue-collar job’. He was paid a minimum wage based on the hour. My father earned so little that be could never afford to take breaks from his job.

Let me share with you two personal stories on how my father taught my siblings and I about patience.

YOU NEED TO BE PATIENT TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

When I was in secondary school, the government introduced the book loan scheme. The only requirement was that, you needed to return the books at the end of the year to the school so the younger students may reuse them. If you’re lucky, you get brand new books. If you aren’t, you get second-hand ones.

I can still recall the day I told my father about this program. I handed him the form. He retorted, “You won’t participate in this program for two reasons. First, if you get second-hand books, the pages might be torn or have scribbles on them. Second, even if you get brand new books, you still have to return them. You can’t keep them for revision next year. That’s useless.”

I must tell you that the house my siblings and I grew in – my parents’ home – wasn’t a showcase. It was practically bare of furniture. In fact, when I was growing up, my father couldn’t afford to paint the wooden walls. They were stained all over. When it rained, the raindrops left permanent irregular marks on them. I often thought that the walls of our home looked like a map straight from a page of the World Atlas! And we all knew the reason – my father worked from dawn to dusk saving all the money he could, not just to put enough food on the table, but to make sure there’s sufficient money to pay for our school fees and new books plus new, decent clothes for Hari Raya. Every year.

My father could have easily accepted the book loan program to ease his financial standing. He could have used the extra money to spruce our home – perhaps to give a fresh coat of paint to our rundown house or buy a modest sofa. But that wasn’t my father. My siblings and I observed what my father did every day and learnt through experience that to get something you really want, you must work hard for it and be patient.

YOU NEED TO BE PATIENT IN TIMES OF HARDSHIP AND ILLNESS

My father spent a good portion of his last three months in a hospital in Johor Bahru. I would take the express bus as often as I could from Kuala Lumpur, taking turns with my siblings to keep him company. On his last days, my father could hardly swallow anything as he had a growth in his trachea. The most he could ingest was a few sips of water.

The doctor attached a shunt (a device to allow flow of nutrients into his ailing and frail body through an opening) to his abdomen. The first time I saw the shunt protruding from the left side of his abdomen, it came as a shock. I remember thinking: What’s this alien thing sitting on my father?

What surprised me was that, despite the obvious discomfort he was in, each time I asked “Sakit ke abah?” (“Does it hurt, father?”), all he would utter was “Tak lah.” (“Not at all.”) with a gentle shake of his head.

My father and I spent many a silent night together at the hospital. Me on the sofa by the window and him stretched on his bed with the drip extending from one side. We hardly talked for my father was a man of few words. I often wondered then, and I still do now: How could a man with so much pain be so calm and composed? But deep inside me, I was determined to become as patient as he was if I were to find myself in a similar situation.

I hope you’re convinced that the smartest, the best and most effective way to teach your kids to be patient is to be patient yourself. Show them how to be patient, don’t just tell them. Be patient when you run into financial hardship. Be patient if you get fired from your job. Be patient if you lost a loved one. Be patient when your kids do something wrong. In short, be patient when Allah Most Merciful is testing you with difficult times in your life.

Remember: KIDS DON’T FOLLOW WHAT YOU SAY. THEY COPY WHAT YOU DO.

I must tell you about a little friend of mine named Adam.

Most times when I see him, the eleven-year-old would be seated at the school canteen, having a bite at breakfast. He eats slowly with an air of sobriety and is careful that the crumbs do not fall onto his lap.

I once presented Adam with a copy of Horrible Science: Blood, Bones and Body Bits, a book that was a favourite with my children. This was the message I wrote inside the front cover flap:

Dear Adam,

Your mom says you really want to be a doctor. Well, this is a book about the kind of stuff you will find in the human body. She also says you love reading so much that all your books are dog-eared … I do hope this book will be treated the same way! I’m sure you’ll be a great doctor one day.

Two days later, I bumped into him at the school gate. “Are you still reading your new book?” I asked.

“I finished it,” he said, looking up at me with big eyes and adjusting his dark-rimmed glasses that sat a bit crooked on his nose bridge.

“You did?” I was pleasantly surprised. The book was almost three-quarters-of-an-inch thick with fairly small print. I had thought he would have needed a few more days, since it was still not a weekend. But with determination like Adam’s, I should have known better.

When Alina, Adam’s mother, was expecting him, she had an infection during the first trimester. The rapidly developing brain of the foetus was adversely affected.

“A day after he turned one, my husband and I went to see a paediatrician at a certain private clinic,” she recalled. “We were informed that Adam has what the experts call ‘late development’. The paediatrician told us squarely in the face that our son will never amount to much. I was stunned. It was like a death sentence. When we got home, I told my husband, ‘We’ll prove the experts wrong.’” And prove them wrong they did.

Over the next several years, Alina stayed home and patiently sat down with Adam each day, painstakingly going through every letter of the alphabet, talking and responding to his every question. When he was six, she brought him for another check-up, this time at a government hospital. The consulting paediatrician was stupefied to discover that Adam could read as well as any six-year-old in spite of his condition.

Alina concedes that, with Adam, everything needs more time.

“When he was five, it took him three months to read his first Ladybird book. His younger brother only needed two weeks,” says the mother of three. “But I noticed that he has a good memory. He can recall events that happened when he was just two-and-a-half years old. He remembers the places we went to plus the details of what we did there. Even I can’t do that!”

A WORLD OF THEIR OWN

I was once a volunteer at a centre for severely handicapped children. Many of these children suffered from cerebral palsy and needed care round the clock. Some of them were infants and quite a few were adolescents. A number had recurrent seizures which could occur anytime, anywhere. Because of the severity of their condition, many of the children were confined to mattresses on the floor where they could roll with help from the nurses. The most neurologically challenged of them would stay in exactly the same position as you left them.

A few of the children could do more. A teacher came daily to teach them to read, write, sing and play basic musical instruments. On one side of a wall, the teacher had proudly put up their handiwork and written down the names of all the children. As she put it, “Their work represents all of the other children as well.” Kamal was one of the few, more able children. His lower body didn’t function and had to be dragged to wherever he wanted to go. The sixteen-year-old boy got around by pushing or pulling his torso. When I asked the teacher about his progress, she said, “I have been teaching Kamal how to add and subtract for several years. He still can’t go beyond two-digit numbers.”

On one occasion, I watched as he sat lopsided on a chair, then grabbed a pencil and laboriously attempted to subtract 13 from 21. He could see better with his left eye and usually tilted his head in such a way that the left eye was about eight inches away from pencil tip and paper. Kamal had a warm and congenial nature. His spoken English was good and I often saw him striking up conversations with new volunteers.

If you were a visitor to this place and not used to severely handicapped children, seeing them for the first time can be emotionally draining. For one, this place was a far cry from the outside world where children run about, laugh and are a constant source of clamour and din. In this place, Kamal was a gem. He would instantly put new volunteers and visitors who were not used to seeing severely handicapped children at ease with his easy banter. But as I said, Kamal was one of the exceptional few. Cerebral palsy for most of the other children meant the inability to talk and communicate their needs. A few hours is all you need to appreciate the frustration induced by the huge communication hurdles between the children and their caregivers.

“MY LEFT FOOT”

Such are the difficulties experienced by those who have cerebral palsy. One can be forgiven for wondering if they can achieve anything significant in their lives. Yet, not too long ago, a boy who was born with cerebral palsy won a children’s painting competition at age twelve. Later, he created history by becoming a celebrated author, poet and painter. When he was an infant, the doctor who diagnosed his condition warned his family not to expect anything from him as he was “mentally defective”.

But his mother protested. She said, “It is his body that is shattered, not his mind.” The boy could not control his speech or his body movements. The only part of his body that he could move on his own free will was his left foot. One day, with this foot, he grabbed a piece of chalk from his sister and scribbled some marks with it. From then on, his mother began to coach him to read and write.

It was a slow, painful process for both mother and child. But by the time of his demise, Christy Brown had penned several books and poems and painted his way into people’s hearts, all with the use of his left foot. As a writer, I often remind myself of Christy Brown when I have doubts about whether I can achieve what I had set out to do.

Christy Brown was not born into a wealthy family. His father was a bricklayer and his mother a homemaker. Between them, they struggled to raise thirteen surviving children of whom Christy was the sixth. Many of his contemporaries had perfectly formed physical features and grew up in families that led far more comfortable lives. Yet, Christy achieved far more than they did!

THE BLIND MAN WHO SCALED MOUNT EVEREST

And then there is Erik Weihenmayer. Erik, in case you haven’t heard of him already, is a man who had perfect eyesight at birth. He became totally blind at thirteen due to a rare eye disease. At first he was devastated. Erik’s father, Ed Weihenmayer, put it to Erik to question his ideas of what a blind person can and cannot do. His father sent Erik to a rock-climbing school for the blind where the boy did more than just rock-climbing. He began to reflect on things.

His defining moment was when it dawned upon him that:

“If I thought I couldn’t read but I can and if I thought I couldn’t be mobile, but I can, maybe there are other things that I can do that I don’t think I can do, if I just approached it differently.”

Erik soon realized that wallowing in self-pity won’t change anything. He chose to change his attitude. He focused on what he could do instead of what he could not do.

By the time he graduated from high school, Erik was the school’s wrestling captain. He went on to graduate school and for a time, was a teacher. At age thirty-three, Erik created history by becoming the first sightless person to reach the peak of Mt Everest. How did he do it? In his words – “Step by step, moment by moment.” Today, apart from having scaled some of the world’s highest peaks, Erik is an author and a motivational speaker.

It’s amazing what boys can achieve when they’re motivated.

What did Adam, Erik and Christy Brown have in common?

They all had parents who believed in them. Despite their limitations, their parents expected them to give nothing less than their personal best – the best they are capable of. Interestingly, none of these parents were considered “experts” in terms of raising boys, not to mention boys with special needs. All of them were regular people like you and me. Yet their parents knew that:

• with boys, you need to stress more on effort, less on ability
• with boys, you need to set high expectations
• boys love challenges

THINK ABOUT IT: What would you do if you had a son like Adam, Erik or Christy?

What we say or do has far-reaching consequences on the ability of our kids to think and act creatively.

Legend has it that ancient Singapore, or Temasek as it was then called, was once invaded by shoals of todak or swordfish. The sea creatures became such a menace that the King ordered his subjects to do away with them. On the appointed day, the brave people of the island descended upon its shores, keen to wipe out the todak once and for all. But it didn’t take them long to realize they were no match for the fishes.

One by one the men fell as the agile todak pierced them with their razor sharp snouts. At that moment, a young boy named Hang Nadim came up with a suggestion: Instead of human shields, why not place banana trunks along the beach to snare the fishes? This turned out to be a brilliant idea! The swordfishes’ snouts were trapped and scores of lives were spared.

The story of Hang Nadim was but one of many that illustrate what happens when children are allowed to think creatively. Some of these kids went on to become great inventors. My guess is that, these idea generators had someone, quite likely a parent or guardian, who had backed them up, fired up their imagination and kept the creative juices flowing in them. It would be difficult to imagine life today without the many designs that are the fruits of labour of people who had concocted exceptional ideas.

From mobile phones to the Internet to laser surgery, these inventions had made great improvements in our daily lives. Throughout the ages, creativity has turned impossibilities into realities. Even in times of war, it is the human trait of creativity that may have the last word on who wins or loses. Had someone not thought of the Trojan Horse, the nearly vanquished Greeks might not have conquered the Trojans and made history!

What is creativity anyway? Quite simply, creativity is bringing something new into being. While the debate rages on among psychologists whether creativity is something you are born with or is influenced by the environment, I believe there is much that we parents can do to nurture our children’s creativity. To this end, I would like to suggest that you:

1. ENTERTAIN YOUR CHILD’S CREATIVITY

Creativity thrives on curiosity. The more you encourage your child’s curiosity, the more creative he gets. Consider George de Mestral, the inventor of Velcro. In the early 1900s, he was a young boy who loved the outdoors and inventing. In fact, his creative streak won him his first patent for a toy plane at the tender age of 12. Each time after his outing with his dog, George was annoyed by the Burdock seeds (a prickly fauna) that stuck to his hunting pants and dog’s fur as it took him hours to remove them. George examined the seeds under the microscope and noticed that each seed had hundreds of tiny hooks that locked themselves onto the fabric of his pants or his dog’s fur. This gave him the germ of an idea and years after much experimenting, Velcro, the hook & loop fastener, was born.

2. TELL YOUR CHILD THAT CREATIVITY HAS MANY FORMS

Because the media has a tendency to refer to certain expressions of artistic pursuits like painting, drawing, acting and dancing as forms of creativity, a child may think that he is not creative because he has no interest in any of these areas. This notion may be further reinforced at learning centres when the children who are able to paint or draw better are referred to as “creative”, which may unwittingly suggest that the other children who are not able to paint or draw as well are not creative. Tell your child that these only represent certain forms of creativity, and creativity encompasses a much wider meaning and possibility. In fact, it is the ability to creatively solve problems and overcome difficult situations that will help your child to not only survive but thrive in the long run.

3. ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO THINK DIFFERENTLY

Creativity often involves the ability to think out of the ordinary. It is the courage of those who dared to think in contrasting ways that has continually made a lasting impact to human lives. Children by nature are born creative. However, to remain creative, they need constant motivation. This is because, creativity involves two processes : thinking and producing. All you have to do is to provide a safe environment for this to happen. For example, if you see your child stacking up a set of wooden blocks horizontally again and again, ask him, ”Is there a way to arrange them another way?

4. BE PREPARED TO INVEST

Your child might need your help to provide the resources to turn his ideas into reality. For this to occur, you might have to set aside your time and money. Think of the time and money that you spend as an investment rather than cost. Even if things don’t work out as expected, assure your child that it’s okay … he would have learnt something new along the way.

I must tell you, however, that the story of Hang Nadim had a cruel twist to it. His smart thinking made him a subject of both admiration and envy in the island. One day, someone convinced His Majesty that the boy will be a threat to his influence and power. In the end, Hang Nadim was ordered thrown into the sea.

While we parents may not treat our children the way the King did, some of us, who have been conditioned to think that parents always know better, may feel threatened with the unconventional thinking that they might come up with. We may even feel defensive or ruffled if we find ourselves unable to respond adequately to our children’s queries and their many questions of “Why”.

The thing is, children have to learn that parents do not have the answers to everything. To keep the creative strain in your child alive and well, do not ridicule or laugh at him when he conceives thoughts that seem crazy or out of this world. Without your timely support and understanding, your child’s creative aspirations may remain just that – an ignored figment of his imagination that will soon fade into nothingness and never see the light of day.