Rampant Delinquency

Another of my colleague has resigned. Her daughter had fallen into the wrong crowd & she had decided to move down south to Waikiki. It isn't that far to drive, just slightly over 50 km but she managed to find a job locally. Although she didn't share what exactly went wrong, it must be pretty bad to warrant such a drastic move. Uprooting herself from her established community, finding a new job, new school for the daughter, finding a new place to stay. Just thinking about the logistics part of it gives me a headache.

A lot of people say they want to migrate for their kids. I think this is 1 trade off to consider. We hear so many accounts of people turning violent in the ED under the influence of meth. Then, there're always stories in the newspaper about young people attacking or even killing their parents becoz they refused to give them money for drugs. A lot of break ins are also due to addicts trying to get money to feed their addiction.

In fact, my next door neighbour is 1. I didn't know initially. I only know there're always screaming, shouting & slamming of doors coming from next door. Turned out that J's colleague's daughter is the 1 living next door. She's only in her early 20s, with a 4 year old daughter. Apparently, this problem with drugs started a long time ago. She'll turn verbally abusive when her younger brother (who's still a student) who lives with her in this rental house has no money to give her. Then, she'll turn on her mother who visits the granddaughter regularly. When she goes into a rampage, she'll even call her 4 year old daughter names like f*cking bitch.

To me, this is the biggest con on raising a kid here. Of course, there are many who turn out good. But the chances of them turning out bad is undeniably higher than that in Sg. The biggest pro is the flexibility & options in education. I believe that we're able to succeed is becoz of the way we were conditioned when we were in Sg. Children brought up here will not have the same mindset. Whether or not studying here is less stressful depends in large on the parents I guess. Will you push your kid to score as close to 100% as possible? Make them learn the subjects in advance in preparation for the following year? We can't force fate to turn in our favour. Good or bad, the only thing we can do is simply to try our best.