Hello, everyone. I am a newcomer to this wonderful parenting forum. Sorry for having to write in English since I haven~{!/~}t learned to use any software for Chinese writing. I guess one day I have to learn it when my two girls (18 and 33 months old now) are old enough to learn Chinese. I learned about this forum from a friend a couple of months ago and very soon this becomes my favorite parenting forum. I really appreciate the positive attitude as well as your many wonderful articles about how to raise a healthy child on the forum site. It's my deep pleasure getting to ~{!0~}know~{!1~} many of you core members through your articles. The articles I often read from this forum emphasize some very precious value like Love, Compassion, Morality and Gratitude. And the core members are often very encouraging and supportive to new comers - one of many reasons I think that have helped the forum to grow steadily. Thank you all for sharing!

Yesterday I read a post from a parent stating that the ultimate goal of raising our children should be keeping a good relationship with them. I don~{!/~}t remember seeing any follow-up discussion on that. Let me try to give my 2 cents on this rather important topic. My thinking is that it should be the long term healthy and close relationship we should be seeking for. It may mean to ~{!0~}sacrifice~{!1~} some short term ones. I remember the author Dan Kindlon of the wonderful book ~{!0~}Too Much of A Good Thing~{!1~} talks about how this generation of parents are longing for becoming our children~{!/~}s close friends since many of us didn~{!/~}t have that with our own parents when we grew up. Sometimes, we go overboard trying to preserve that friendship and sacrifice our responsibility as parents - providing guidance besides friendship. The example he gave in the book as I remember has to do with whether you would let your 15-year-old daughter to join her boyfriend~{!/~} family for a weekend ski getaway. As parents who would not want our children to get into sexual relationship too young, our responsibility should be saying NO. But as a friend, we may not want to disappoint our child. Some parents may choose to say YES in order to preserve the friendship. The author disagrees strongly with this type of friendship only parenting style. He stated that parents should say NO even it means that your child may get very mad at you. She may argue that it means that you don~{!/~}t trust her. The author suggested stating the fact that ~{!0~}if it were me at your age, I would not trust myself~{!1~}.

As you will see later, many of my parenting thoughts are based on what I pick up from my own parents, from parenting books and parenting forum sites like this one with little of my own parenting experiences so far. So take it with a grain of salt as always.

Thanks for listening and good night!

ChiuLan