It is a truth universally acknowledged that parents love to compare. We quietly compare how portly our cherubs were at the hour of their nativity, how strapping our youthful charges have since grown to be, and how happily convinced we are of their considerable scholastic prowess. We might even go so far as to compare, betwixt ourselves and other fathers, the size of our Dickensian vocabulary.
(You’ll be relieved to note that my Dickensian lexicon is so tiny that I’ve just about exhausted all my clever, classic prose, and nevermore shall I entreat you with such clumsy Austen-isms.)
Our love for comparing doesn’t just compel us to measure up against fellow parents. More recently, we’ve taken it one step further – or back, depending on how you look at it – by pitting our parenting styles against those of our parents’, analysing how we were raised versus how we are bringing up our own children today.
Sensible New-Age Parents
Modern modes of parenting, bolstered by years of rigorous psychological research and social media doomscrolling, are complex and varied. As a parent, you can today choose to be gentle (prioritising empathy), respectful (treating our children as equal individuals) or authoritative (setting clear and consistent boundaries to ensure that our children are comfortable and confident). Adopting these progressive parenting philosophies would certainly make one a well-informed and lucid adult caregiver of children.
On the other hand, you can also be a bad parent by being too permissive, too authoritarian or too helicopter. I know the last one sounds like a lot more fun for young children (“My daddy’s an Apache chopper!”), but it is largely frowned upon by expert doomscrollers.
Old Way or the Highway
Our parents didn’t really have access to these newfangled parenting theories, and probably would not have cared very much for them. If you were raised in the 1980s, the focus of your parents was basically to keep you in school, out of jail, and off drugs. For a lot of them, validating your feelings was an extravagance their factory-operator salaries couldn’t afford. And heaping lavish praise for your effort when all you’ve done is survive recess? Well, as Charles Dickens himself would put it succinctly, that’s just a load of skibidi toilet.
Instead, the only way they knew how to parent was to give you absolutely no choice in the matter. Compared to the caregiving approaches today, this classic parenting style was a much more economical and cost-effective method: Do As I Say, Or…. (aka Daiso parenting). And what’s truly magical about Daiso parenting is that no child has ever found out first-hand, “or… what?” At least no child has ever lived to tell the story.
That is also exactly why the Daiso parenting method would probably not work very well in this modern day. Threatening our children with cryptic but dire consequences runs counter to the newly developed parenting imperatives we now subscribe to. For example, it is recommended that we help develop our children’s ‘growth mindset’, encouraging them to fail fearlessly and develop resilience. This will go a long way to properly prepare them for the true difficulties they will endure later in life. Difficulties such as career challenges, identity uncertainties, and embarrassingly paltry video views for their TikTok shorts.
Spare Us the Rod….
Daiso parenting also sounds terribly menacing, like you would readily smite your disobedient child with the wrong end of a feather-duster if utter compliance was not proffered. And that is perhaps the mother of all differences between how our parents chose to nurture us and how we are now electing to nurture without a good whupping every now and then.
Physical discipline has long been frowned upon in the western world, where parents would send their children to their rooms as a form of punishment. Growing up, I’ve always been puzzled by this whenever I watched it on TV – how exactly is being sent to your room, where you can presumably take a nap, punishment? Also, you mean you have your own room?!
In our Asian society of the past, corporal punishment was harsh, with varying degrees of severity, depending on how heinous your wrongdoing. Your quivering palms might be slapped with a ruler, your fidgeting buttocks might be smacked with a whippy rattan rod, or you might even find chillis forcefully mashed into your mouth. For connoisseurs of the delectable sambal belacan condiment, I imagine the latter would be the equivalent of being sent to your room.
Most parents will agree that physical punishment of any sort, no matter the child’s predilection for spicy flavours, is a bad idea. Not only is it not the best way to correct errant behaviour, it is also potentially illegal. Modern parenting methods recommend that we teach our children, rather than punish them. That we should guide them rather than control them. And if all else fails and you are left frustrated and hapless, well, at least you know that you’ll be developing a growth mindset and a healthy dose of resilience.
I Am Jenny's Father 
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