Thoughts on... My Childhood

Apologies for the lack of posts. I have been inundated with 'things-to-do', at first from work and now from my part-time studies. But this blog lives on and I will do my best to continue posting.

Moving on...

I was born in the mid-80s. The country I was living in was developing at a comfortable pace, peace was prevalent and a majority of the population had a roof over their heads, three meals a day, fathers had jobs, mothers were usually housewives, children attended school and everyone is clothed. Life was straightforward and simple.

When we were young we had toys, not in excess, but enough to keep us occupied during the endless afternoons where our mother/grandmother/caretakers had their afternoon naps or were busy with household chores. Our toys were made out of plastic, wood, metal or Plastercine (Play-Doh for kids nowadays). Nothing we own is as technologically advanced as an iPad or an Xbox 360. I remember I had an old Nintendo console but I could not remember playing with it. Mobile phones were a rarity and nobody could afford them. At that point, nobody needed a mobile phone anyway. Smartphones were light years from being invented. I had Barbie dolls that were always white-skinned with blond hair (I play with them while my younger brother destroys them), plastic cooking toys to play masak masak (masak means cooking in the Malay language so literally it is cooking cooking) and stuffed toys. My younger brother had green plastic toy soldiers (those that you see in Toy Story, the ones with the legs moulded together on a flat stand), army tanks, toy guns that shoots rubber bullets that sticks to glasses and Hot Wheels cars. With just this array of toys and our imaginations, we managed to entertain ourselves during those long quiet afternoons. We played with the same toys over and over again and never got bored of it.

Thinking about it, my mother had it easy back then. We rarely disturb her afternoon naps. We can almost always find things to keep us occupied; playing with said toys, rummaging through my little treasure box (more like a file holder of sorts) and rearranging the stuff in there, drawing on whatever piece of blank paper I could find and whatever spot of wall my brother could find, or simply having an afternoon nap ourselves. We never bothered her for things to do, and I believed that it is over those quiet afternoons where we were left to our own devices that our imaginations heightened and developed.

When we were a little older, all we had to do was to fulfill our roles of being children. Easy-peasy. We eat, sleep, poop, cry, laugh, kick up a fuss at times and generally have a love/hate relationship with our parents. We did not attend child care because we usually have someone to take care of us, our mothers, grandmothers, maids and relatives. We grew up watching television programmes that were safe for us to watch (mainly cartoons). There were no cable channels back then; no HBO/Cinemax screening NC16 or M18 movies/programmes, no MTV with boobs and booty-shaking, and no reality TV.  The lack of reality TV and MTV helped keep our worldview sane and preserved our innocence. We didn’t want to emulate how crazy celebrities lived their crazily excessive lives or try to dress like those scantily-clad singers on MTV.

The only aspect that my brother and I detested was that our parents pushed us to study hard. This is so that we will not suffer in future. They did not force us to join dance, music or art & crafts classes. These were discovered naturally and then nurtured at our pace. They do not enroll us into baby beauty pageants, kids’ modeling competitions and whatnots. It was unheard of at that time. Studies always came first. Play came second. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

When we were young, we ate food that our mothers cooked. Boring it may seem but far healthier. Eating out was a bonus and my brother and I looked forward to eating out, which only happened about once a week. Food cooked in a restaurant or an eatery outside seemed so much more appetizing and tasty as compared to home-cooked food. Even Maggi noodles (instant noodles) tasted far better. But we were so wrong. We craved for home-cooked food nowadays, especially when breakfast and lunch is taken outside.

There was, but of course, the archaic disciplining method of caning when we were young. Where I come from, it is as common as grass growing at the roadside. Hell, even my parents (my father mainly, my mother was a saint) grew up with the cane. But even though there were caning, child abuse was quite unheard of back then (maybe just not reported as much or kids do not have the concept of child abuse yet). But caning was done fairly and meted out only when needed in my family. There were a few scenarios when the cane will come out, 1) when toys were strewn all over the floor and we needed motivation packing, 2) when we refused to eat dinner or took very long to swallow a single serving (my parents believed we had worms in our tummy that obstructs our appetite) and 3) when we started talking back to our parents or kicking up a fuss/throwing tantrums (I am a big crybaby while my brother is devilishly naughty). Other than that we are loved as children and were treated as so.

These days, kids grow up too fast. They are far too mature to heed their parents’ advice (some say that is independence), less innocent in their ways and yet still vulnerably fragile. Parents have also gone for the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ approach, mainly doing verbal admonishing. I am not judging which way is best, but I do think that there is a great difference between the kids I grew up with back then and the kids that are growing up today.