1. Carry anti-bacterial wipes with you wherever you go;
2. Think that all tables at food centres are crawling with germs (in fact most of them probably are);
3. Execute a predatory pounce at your kid when he starts examining stuff found on the ground;
4. Freak out when your kid smears a public table with his little saliva-smeared hands and then puts them back in his mouth;
5. Have your kid running to an empty table and putting one hand and one leg on empty stools before anyone else gets to them;
6. Go ballistic when your kid transforms into a monkey on the MRT;
7. Threaten to smack butts in front of audiences when your kid doesn’t behave (despite knowing you’d never do such a thing);
8. Discharge verbal discipline with a wagging finger, as if you’d want the kid looking cross-eyed into it;
9. Take the kid to a public toilet and the first words out of your mouth are, “DON’T touch anything.”
10. Stand in line for pre-school registration when the kid isn’t even three months old;
11. Start being pedantic about almost everything, including stomatas, stamens and filaments, when all the kid did was to smile at the flower;
12. Lament over how, for ages, you haven’t had a nice, long, undisturbed poop with a magazine in hand;
13. Start calculating how much money you should set aside for Chinese New Year ang pows based on the historical average of how much your kid “earned”;
14. Start buying truckloads of assessment books for your kid dreaming that he’d go to them like a moth to candlelight;
15. Try to teach your kid proper English and realise you aren’t even doing it in proper English;
16. Get too eager to speak and end up inventing new spliced words, like “stop banging so houd”, as in hard and loud;
17. Think your kid will become a doctor when he starts playing doctor;
18. Think that your kid will scrub toilets for the rest of his life if you don’t get him enough tuition and enrichment classes (P.S. nothing wrong with scrubbing toilets if it pays enough);
19. Get him enrolled in Mandarin lessons, phonics lessons, music lessons, martial art lessons, drama classes, art classes, story-telling classes, sport enrichment, and then tell yourself you aren’t being competitive;
20. Turn red when your kid asks you how the sperm got to know the egg.
How many of them could you connect with?
1 to 4 items – Long way off. Good or bad? Can’t really tell.
5 to 9 items – You’re doing a great job at restraining yourself.
10 to 15 items – A veteran who’s pretty much seen it all.
All items – Congratulations! You’re certified APT – Asian Parent Trainer.
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