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发表于 5-12-2011 18:41:46|来自：广东广州
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本帖最后由 sunflower77 于 6-12-2011 00:14 编辑
Mum is their secret
- Top-scoring PSLE pupils say their stay-home mums were a big help but experts say working, hands-on mums can offer such support too
-extracted from the sundaytimes December 4, 2011
Leia Teo, 12, was a top pupil in her cohort for most of her primary school years. Yet when she was due to sit the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) this year, her mum quit her job as a bank project manager in June to help her with her revision.
Madam Pang Siew Chen, 45, says:"Leia needed my support. It's a critical stage in her life, so I wanted to be there for her. Going forward, when she is in secondary school, there is nothing much I can do."
Leia, who studied at Kong Hwa School and had an aggregate score of 278, is among the top five PSLE performers in Singapore this year.
Among the top five scorers, three had mothers who had quit their jobs and two had mums who took on part-time work in order to spend more time with them.
Madam Pang had worked in the banking industry for 20 years and made her way up to become a vice-president at a bank.
Then she quit that hard-won position when her elder son Lucas sat the PSLE last year. He performed well enough to get into Hwa Chong Institution, although she declined to reveal his aggregate score.
She found a job after his examinations and worked until June this year.
The career sacrifice has been well worth it for Madam Pang, whose husband works in the navy. "When I see my children achieve their good results, it's a great achievement for me as a mother as well. This is how I strike a balance as a working mum," she says.
She will be looking for another job soon.
Another mum who feels that staying home helped her child is Madam carrie Tan, 41, who gave up her job as a corporate lawyer when her eldest child Yasmin Ziqin Mohamed Yousoof was in Primary 1. She felt she was in the best position to help her daughter as she understood her best.
Yasmin, from Rulang Primary, was this year's top performer with a score of 283.
Madam Tan tailored her coaching to suit Yasmin, who had also been among the top performers in her school throughout the years. "She is an auditory learner. So while driving, I would go through points with her and she would remember them," says Madam Tan, who even customised English and mathematics worksheets for Yasmin.
Madam Tan, who has two younger sons aged nine and five, says it was not easy at first adapting to life as a full-time mother as she had to cook, do household chores and tend to her children. Her hasband, Mr Mohamed Yousoof Abdul Majeed, 41, is a director of foreign exchange in a bank.
"At the beginning, it was very frustrating. You begin to doubt your self-worth after a while. There were times I couldn't stand it. I've had my moments when I just wanted to go out and talk to thinking adults," she says with a laugh.
However, not all mothers see the benefits of staying home for their children.
Mrs J. Low, a director at a statutory board, chose to work part-time when her elder girl, now 19, sat the PSLE but found it did not help her. "I couldn't tutor her. Even if she was looking at the book, her heart wasn't there," says Mrs Low, who is in her mid-40s and married to an academic.
So when her younger daughter, now 17, sat the same examination two years later, she continued working full-time. The result: The younger girl, who was more motivated than her sister, performed better at the PSLE.
"How well a child does depends on how motivated she is. There is no difference if the mum is at home, unless the mother is a super tutor," Mrs Low says.
Counsellors and psychiatrists say there are benefits for kids whose mums are at home, especially at the primary-school level.
The fact that these mums are willing and able to stay home means they are financially secure and are pro-active about their child's education,says Dr Brian Yeo, consultant psychiatrist at Mount Elizabeth Hospital.
But even if a mum is not able to help the child academically, just being there to give moral support helps, he adds. This moral support also applies to working mums, who can coach their children after work or take leave nearer the examinations.
Still, Primary 6 pupils whose mums stay home for them appreciate the sacrifices made. Leia says her mother was instrumental in helping her achieve good results. "When she is home, I can ask her if there are questions I don't know. She also controls my play time and TV time or I might have played most of the time," she says.
But "now that PSLE is over, she can go back to work so I can relax more. She watches me like a hawk when she's at home".
以上是俺从昨天的报纸一个字母一个字母敲上来的，还没核查，忙着陪儿子练琴呢，版亲们见谅。
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