Parental Guidance

The relationship between parent and child is as timeless and resilient as a diamond, but what solidifies their bond are the values that are passed down. These three families share with Karishma Tulsidas how quality time together is their most precious commodity THE HEAHS

DARREN GABRIEL LEOW DESMOND LIM

Photography Fashion Direction Doctors Heah Sieu Min and Caroline Low-heah would ask their children Elizabeth and Nicholas to mete out their own punishments when they were younger. “They’d sentence themselves, and I’d ask them, ‘Do you think you’re being fair?’” recounts Caroline. “Of course, my younger son would go, ‘Okay, three hours of no TV’, and then my daughter would kick him and say, ‘I think it’s two days!’ They understood the severity of things that could go wrong.” Now that they are much older—elizabeth is a 24-year-old medical graduate, while Nicholas is a 22-year-old computer engineering student—the two young adults embody the values of justice, diligence and hard work that their parents have taught them. This is the result of Sieu Min and Caroline’s loving, yet firm disciplinary methods. Despite both being full-time working parents, they value the quality of time spent together with their children and believe that their role is to always support them—not just financially, but emotionally and psychologically as well. “We don’t believe in quantity, we believe in spending quality time with the family. There’s no use spending 20 hours together if you’re focused on the wrong things. Children don’t need to be mollycoddled, they need to grow up on their own. But when we spend time together, we need to emphasise on certain things such as inculcating the right values in them,” says Sieu Min. “As parents, we need to give our children the confidence to do stuff on their own, instead of doing everything for them. We are fortunate that our kids are focused.”