MCYS Director: Don't Outsource Fathering

Tuesday, Sep. 29, 2009 Posted: 1:17:09AM HKT

A man paying another to spend time with his wife.

Can this scenario be imagined?

And yet, this is precisely what many fathers are doing to their children when they delegate the responsibility of fathering their children to others, said Mr Jason Wong, Director of the Rehabilitation, Protection and Residential Services Division of the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. Mr Wong was giving a talk on fathering on Saturday.

People tend to “outsource caring, bonding and impartation of values”, according to the soft-spoken ministry leader, a father of two children.

He touched many hearts with video clips revolving around the importance of spending time with children.

The message of one particularly visual clip was that ‘children see; children do’.

He followed that up with the story of a man who returned home tired from work one day only to find his son asking to play with him. Being innovative, the father took a world map, tore it up, and told his child to fix it, expecting to be given 20 minutes that way to read the papers.

Around three minutes later, the boy told his father that he had completed the ‘puzzle’. The man was very surprised and saw that it was true. He asked his son how he managed to fix it so quickly and the boy, showing him that behind each piece was part of the face of a man, said: “If I can fix the man, I can fix the world”.

“I believe if we can fix the family, fix ourselves in how we parent our children, we can fix the world, we can fix society, we can fix many social issues,” he said.

The seminar, organised by Cornerstone Community Church, saw a small room filled with not just many fathers, but their families with them.

At one point, he showed a clip of a school-boy who was an orphan. There are 800 of these children, said Mr Wong, stressing that though many children today have fathers it is important to ask, 'What sort of home do our children go back to?' 'Do they like it?' 'Are we home?' 'What do they say when they see us?'

He went on to relate the account of a school-girl who cried even though she scored well because her mother had ever increasing expectations of her.

"I tell my children: you are not your marks," he said, noting that the trend among parents is to measure their children by their success or failure in their tests and exams.

The former Deputy Director cum Chief of Staff of the Singapore Prison Service cited the case of an ex-offender whose wedding he recently attended. In spite that he was not well-educated, he could speak Mandarin well and was going on mission trips to China.

God uses the weak to shame the strong, and the foolish to shame the wise, he said, urging parents not to look down on their children.

During his talk, Mr Wong shared the true story of a graduate who did not feel comfortable to get a boyfriend because of the pain she experienced as a child in her family. Her parents brought her up telling her that they gave birth to her because they wanted someone to take care of them in their old age.

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Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com