REAL GIFTS OF A ROAD WARRIOR PARENTS

This year's theme for the National Day Parade, "Our Global City, Our Home," forces me to reflect on one aspect of globalisation that often has a silent but salient impact on our future: Our children.

As a result of our effort to embrace globalisation, many of us have to travel overseas often as road warriors. When I travel, I often feel guilty leaving my children behind. I am frequently tempted to buy their permission to go overseas with promises of bringing exotic gifts back.

I know of one road warrior who habitually returns with expensive gifts for his son to make up for his absence from home.

Bringing back gifts per se isn't the problem — it is when we replace or substitute ourselves with gifts that will have an impact on our children. They will end up looking at us as nothing more than a perpetual Santa Claus, and soon they will look forward to our gifts instead of us coming back.

Encouraged to be materialists, they will end up demanding more expensive presents each time we leave. And some of us will find it a convenient and small price to pay to occupy our children's time leaving us — when we get home — alone to rest and recuperate.

How do we get back to focusing on developing our relationships with our children and our spouse, instead of treating them as an optional extra in our life?

I remember once, my husband left 40 handwritten post-it notes with the words "I love you" all over the house for me to discover. Why 40? That was the number of days he was away from home.

When he goes to places where the postal service is not that regular, he would leave letters pre-written before his trip for me to read to the children before they go to sleep.

My husband and I try to take turns to go overseas so that at least one parent is at home with the children. The one who stays at home will have the fun of keeping the memory of the travelling parent alive for them. We'd write letters, make postcards, draw pictures or create gifts for the returning parent.

With Internet messenger, SMS and email, we find it easier to maintain an open channel of communication with our children. Only recently did I learn to use Internet messaging with some difficulty and I discovered a different but instantaneous way of keeping in touch with my children.

Establishing family culture helps our children to stay rooted to the family. Like many in Singapore, my husband and I are working and thus, find it difficult to be with them regularly.

We have often heard that it is not the quantity of time that we spend that is important, but the quality time that we have with them.

But what is quality time?

Spending time at the shopping centre buying more presents, or eating at fancy and expensive restaurants? Yes, these can be instances of quality time as long as our children have our undivided attention.

For us, we prefer alternative rituals like ice cream parties at home, midnight supper walks, or a regular visit to Chinatown where we eat the famous fish porridge.

Whether we are stay-at-home or auto-roaming parents, we have to remember that if we do not act as our children's confidantes, companions and confessors, they will find others to take our place — and we will lose any influence over their behaviour.

But being there for them, in the real sense of the term, is not something one can just suddenly do overnight. It is the little actions we do over a long period of time that add up.

In my course of work as a teacher, I often meet lonely students who long and pine for their parents who are often too busy to spend time with them. Some students end up being withdrawn, some end up finding support and companionship with gangs, while others end up using gifts and money to buy friendship.

As road warrior parents, perhaps it is time to reflect on the type of relationship that we have with our children.

Are we just satisfied with being their ATM? The choice is ours.

The writer has recently taken a tentative step to blog (fohl.blogspot.com) in the hope that it will make her look hip with her teenager children.