Of Funerals and Night Terror

One year ago in May 2016 when we first brought Thirdy here in Singapore for vacation, he experienced what pediatricians call "Night Terror." It might sound like a horror movie title, but in some sense that was what we, the parents (especially me) felt after he inconsolably cried for 30 minutes or so while he was asleep! We were sleeping peacefully when all of a sudden, he started screaming. I woke up with a start and tried to soothe him by giving him the breast (the boob has always calmed him down), but it didn't work. I brought him to the bathroom and turned on the shower because he liked to catch the water, but he was closing his eyes. By then, his Dad and I felt so helpless. We tried to wake him up, but he just kept flailing his arms. After about 30 minutes of incessant crying, he calmed down and welcomed the breast. A quick search at Google about what just transpired led me to Night Terror. Here's the link that helped me.

http://kidshealth.org/en/parents/terrors.html

So the cause of night terror is overstimulation during daytime. But the superstitious in me said it's because of the Chinese funeral under the HDB Building. Everyday, we would pass by the funeral vigil and I would smell the burning incense and the hair-raising chants. It was my first time to witness a Chinese funeral vigil and of course, I found it weird. I was convinced that the funeral caused Thirdy's night terror.

Fast forward to May 2017 and we are here again on a Dependents' Pass. Again, there was a funeral vigil under our HDB for about a week. We are on the 2nd floor, so everytime they're burning something, the smoke drifts up to our window. On the day of the funeral, I heard a melancholic Chinese music and from my window and saw the family of the deceased walking with the casket (inside the funeral car) of their loved one in their mourning clothes. As I watched them in their grief, I could not help but feel sad for the family. I even shed a tear. Grief is a universal feeling, after all.

Thirdy no longer has night terror attacks, and after witnessing that funeral, I can say that perhaps, his night terror was not because he was haunted by the dead. It was probably just a nasty case of overstimulation.

 A funeral at the basement of our HDB (Home Development Board)

NOTE: This is weird but Thirdy had another bout of night terror (the worst, so far) AFTER I published this post. Coincidence?

Teaching Babies (and Parents) To be More Human at Balay Binhi

In my mid-twenties, I was a snooty graduate student who liked to toss philosophical words in any word salad essay like idealism, empiricism, and theism. But my favorite one was the word 'humanistic'. And for awhile I claimed to be a humanistic person because I adhered to the philosophy of humanism. To make it academic sounding, I'd tell people (who cared to ask about my teaching philosophy) that I am into the existential-humanism philosophy, which basically means that human beings are inherently good and that they carve their own destiny.

I am now in my early-thirties, a full-time mother and a wife. I have since stopped being snooty because after almost a decade of being in the academe, I really don't have anything to show that I am scholarly. My rather mediocre resume will prove just that. But I have learned so much from my short stint as an elementary teacher and from my 9 years of teaching in a university. For one, no matter how much private and public schools in our country claim to mold the character of our youth, we still end up with self-serving leaders (and they come from the so-called Ivy League schools here).

I still claim to be a humanist, but what does it mean to be one? I found some answers in my son's toddler school in Leganes called Balay Binhi.

Here are other lessons I learned from this little community of nurturers:

1. Love is best spelled as T-I-M-E.

Every article I have come across about how to rear a genius or how to have well-adjusted kids seem to boil down to this simple advice - spend time with your kids. Nothing beats having Mom around to listen or Dad helping little Johnny fix his bike. Everybody knows love is best spelled as t-i-m-e,  but it's difficult to practice it when you're a career mom. This is one of the reasons why I was happy to let go of my job.

2. Exposure to gadgets at an early age do more harm than good.

And not just gadgets, mind you. Include battery-operated toys, as well. I have personally witnessed how pushing buttons on a plastic toy to prompt animal sounds and blinking lights caused Thirdy to become a zombie. TV, tablets, and cellphones not only damage a child's vision, it also damages his brain causing him to become addicted to such.

3. A child's job is to play, not study.

From 0-7 years old according to Steiner (founder of Waldorf Education), a child should be taught that the world is beautiful, not a structured place where spewing the multiplication table and the alphabet backwards are more superior tasks than climbing trees and playing with mud. And how do we teach them that the world is beautiful? By nurturing their imagination. But how? By play, of course. Period.

4. Early academics will not make your child any smarter.

Sure, you might find a 2-year-old who already knows how to read a genius, but will this little bit of a talent matter to him after 30 years when he is struggling to find a job because he has poor interpersonal skills? I think what matters more is for our children to become highly functional adults, not someone who can memorize a textbook from cover to cover.

5. Parents need to be educated, too.

This is what I truly appreciate from our sessions at Balay Binhi. The parents are the ones who are educated and the children are allowed to just be children.

And the humanistic part? Balay Binhi focuses on the head, heart, and hands of a child. They make sure that none is too big nor too small than the other. Now, that's one lesson in not being snooty.