Singapore—Madam Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and chief executive of Temasek Holdings, has shared a post from a popular Facebook group about raising imperfect children.
She shared the post from the Love What Matters Facebook page late on Monday night (Apr 19)
The page, with over 8 million followers all over the world, often has entries or anecdotes that centre on families and gentle parenting, affirmation, self-acceptance, and kindness.
The post originally appeared on the “Living Full” page on Facebook.
The post read, “Let’s raise imperfect children and be okay with it.
Let’s be okay with them messing up and apologizing.
Let’s be okay with them crying in public.
Let’s be okay with them not fitting in the mold.
Because we want to raise humans who are real, happy, and able to embrace all of life’s messiness.
So I’m proud to be the not-so-perfect parent of not-so-perfect children.”
The gracious and forgiving sentiments in the post stand in contrast with the traditional Asian tropes of parents expecting perfection, excellence and success from their children. It’s an anti Tiger-mom perspective, so to speak.
But, as times have changed, maybe this is the kind of parenting that is more needful today.
Mdm Ho is the mother of two sons: Li Hongyi, born in 1987, and Li Haoyi, born in 1989.
Li Hongyi, who has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, as well as one in Economics, from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, has worked for GovTech for over seven years.
He started out as a consultant with GovTech and was promoted to the position of deputy director in January 2018.
He now serves as the deputy director of the Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Division.
A few years ago, he and a team at GovTech developed an app that was designed to make parking easy for Singaporeans. It was launched in October 2017 and turned out to be a big success. Before the pandemic, it was being used more than one million times each month.
Meanwhile, Mdm Ho’s younger son, Li Haoyi, is a software engineer who has created and maintained several open-source coding libraries.
He is also behind Haoyi’s Programming Blog, which has earned a reputation for being the go-to source for best practices in Scala programming.
In a move that is quite unusual for the son of any Prime Minister, he also has a crowdfunding endeavour on Patreon wherein he asks individuals to “please chip in to support the work and make sure the projects you use can continue to be maintained and provide value to you for the foreseeable future!”
Those who are interested have the option of contributing a monthly sum of S$5, S$25, S$125 or more.
He has been working as a staff software engineer for Databricks since September 2017. Like his elder brother, he also graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but has Bachelor of Science degrees are in electrical engineering and computer science.
/TISG
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