Happiness, Health and Intelligence are three things all parents wish for their
children. There’s an old Chinese saying, “望子成龙, 望女成凤” – all parents wish for their children to be a dragon or a phoenix. And indeed, why not? After all, wishing the best for one’s loved ones is something that comes naturally.

So of course, the vital question is simply: “How?”
Psychologists and educators are wont to say that every person is unique, that what works for one person may not work for another. And they’re right, too. But I believe, as long as we possess the same basic inner humanity, there are some things that all of us will require, that the children of the world, regardless of race, language and religion, will require. And that’s what I’m going to write about.

Health

Let us start by talking about the most basic tenets – namely health, the maintenance of the body. We are far better off than our historical forebears in this area. We have luxuries such as access to all sorts of foods and vitamins, modern technologies and medicines, and the affluence to pay for them. We even have entire shelves of magazines and books devoted to telling us how we can be healthy! But we are only as healthy as we make ourselves.

The figures are quite telling. America, a first world country with a first-world healthcare system, has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, hovering at somewhere around 33%. No plea for mitigation can be
said: that Americans do not have access to important information regarding how to stay healthy, or lack the means to do so. They simply neglect their health.

Of course, we all wish for our children to be healthy individuals. However, thought without action is toothless. Don’t just talk about eating healthy, do
it! Include vegetables during family meals, encourage children to exercise, take the whole family to parks on weekends to jog, or bike. Load yourself up with the prerequisite information. Ingrain the habits of exercise and healthy eating inside your child’s mind from the very beginning. Buy organic. Whatever. As long as you truly want to make your child healthy, nothing can stop you.

Intelligence

Having addressed health, let’s move on to something a bit more … abstract: Intelligence. What is intelligence, anyway? For most of us, intelligence is
directly equitable with academic excellence. This may be true to some degree, but to relate intelligence purely to numbers on an exam report is not accurate. Intelligence encompasses all sorts of other things; factual recall, the ability to process raw information, spatial awareness, whatever. It has not been fully defined. I can’t in all seriousness tell people how to make their kids more intelligent; that’s a job for the biologists and experimental psychologists. What I can do, however, is simply to offer my personal viewpoint.

Intelligence is not something which you can talk about in specifics. It is necessary to offer a broad-based approach, as talking about one aspect of “Intelligence” will get nowhere. When it comes to the mind, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Likewise, you can’t force information and skills into a child’s mind. No, in order for one to be
“intelligent”, there must be a self-motivated urge to learn.

However, that is not to say that you wash your hands off your child’s intellectual development! While some children are naturally more inclined to learn than others, environmental influence plays an equally big, if not
bigger part in making people learn – your involvement is just as important, if not more so. The aim here is for the child to develop a vested interest in learning, so that he will direct his own education.

To develop a love of learning, one has to develop a love of activities that stimulate learning. And this is where the books come in. Reading books has
generally been acknowledged to stimulate a person’s creative thinking skills, develop a greater ability to communicate, enrich his life experience and grant him super powers. Okay, maybe I was exaggerating on that
last bit, but the benefits of reading have doubtlessly been espoused to you before, and I shall not repeat it herewith.

However, one must bear in mind that there are good and bad books. Obviously, having an eight year old read the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Oscar Wilde would not be appropriate. Or then again, it might be. Each child is different, and has different thresholds for fear and maturity, hence it is important that you exercise discretion in determining what materials and books your kid has access to. The line between stimulating a child’s
intellectual development and scarring him permanently for life is exceedingly fine.

Of course, we shouldn’t be short-sighted into thinking that only reading can stimulate someone’s intellectual development. Other activities, such as
museum visits, viewing movies, and doing hands-on activities all can contribute to intelligence just as much as reading. Intelligence is relative, there is absolutely no sense in confining the measure of intelligence to only
academic returns, creative writing skills or any other singular standard. Intelligence is, as I have mentioned, a broad-based collection of seemingly unrelated expertises which cannot be adequately quantified. For a sharp and critical mind to develop there must be willpower to do so. And that’s my two cents on this issue.

Happiness

And finally, we move on to that last elusive H, happiness. Happiness is even more abstract and hard to define than intelligence, it sometimes defies logic
and common sense. A person who appears to have everything in the world may be extremely unhappy, while a more unfortunate person may in fact be happier. Parenting in one way could raise a contented child, yet make another very, very unhappy. In the face of such ambiguity, what can one do?

You can do two things. You can try, and you can gather more information.

Each child is ultimately different, and different approaches work in different ways, the only way to find out if any of them work is to try. Does my child require hard discipline or will a softer method suffice? Why is my child so unhappy with the way I do things? How is it possible for me to make him happy? Try and find out. In something as changeable and ambiguous as human happiness, results may vary. Sometimes, no matter how much you try to make a kid happy, he’ll still hate you. Other times, no matter how horrible life is for a kid, he’ll still be happy and cheerful.

While there is no hard and fast rule as to whether someone will be happy. There is, however, a hard and fast rule that will determine whether someone is unhappy; and that is the absence of parental love. A child who is not loved by his parents will never grow up happy, as will a child who grows up in an unhappy household. But beyond that – nobody knows, really. That is why trying your best and making sure that you are well-informed is important. If your child is unhappy and needs help, don’t let yourself be the last person to
know. Take charge of your child’s well being. Nobody can replace a parent – not grandparents, not maids.

There is simply no substitute for a parent. If you bear this in mind, you (and your child) will go far.

Koh Shang Hsuen, 13 years old