Home And Family

Is it difficult to educate young children? Apparently not, because I’ve seen wonderful children every where.

Someone I know very well, Akang, has two teenage children. He often visits remote villages in the mountainous area of Sukabumi (west Java- Indonesia), his home town. His mission is to distribute charity money that he has collected from a list of his close friends in his office. One day, he decided to adopt a 6 year old girl from one of the villages. The girl is very happy to be able to live with him and never wants to get back to the mountain.

One day, the girl told Akang that she wanted to go to a restaurant, a place she’d never found in the mountain. It’s also one of the places where Akang visits once in a blue moon in his modest life. So Akang took the girl to eat out at a street food hawker. She enjoyed the food, took a time to look around and asked a question :” Is this really a restaurant?”. Akang answered: “Yes”.

My son, Aqmal, was also such a wonderful boy during his pre-school years (I didn’t send him to kindergarten). I remembered him as an independent young boy as he always managed to find something to keep himself busy.

At about the age of two, little Aqmal was crazy about toy cars and no wonder every one around him would give him a piece or two pieces of car miniatures. That’s why he had a huge collection of them. He also liked to collect pictures of car accessories. I helped him cut pictures from magazines and pasted them over his ‘cars’. There was also a time when he loved watching the film “Dare Devil” so much. He watched it over and over again and would ask me to draw the characters he saw in the film. At the age of four, he turned into computer games. It even made my trouble-free life with him a lot easier. There were other activities that we did together: visiting interesting places in town, reading books, counting, writing, etc.

Aqmal entered a primary school at exactly the age of six. My husband and I found a new and promising school not very far from our house. The lady who run a psychology test on Aqmal wrote down on the test report (I read it a few days later) that Aqmal looked as neat as an adult. On that same day, as the test was still being performed on other children, the school director spotted Aqmal and gave a remark to the father that he could be certain Aqmal was a smart boy by looking into Aqmal’s eyes. Then, surprisingly, he sent Aqmal together with the father to the enrollment room and gave an order to enlist Aqmal as their new student right away.

The school director also has a wonderful daughter. The two of them travel a long distance between home and school. The school is in Tebet (Jakarta) and their house is in Sentul area, about 50km away. The only vechicle they have is a motorbike. Every morning, the young girl sits behind her father, hugs his waist from behind and doesn’t stop reciting the content of Quran that she has memorized all the way to school!

The author was a working mother for years before she decided to stay home and to focus caring for her family with three children beside writing a real life parenting blog (http://www.parents-children.blogspot.com)