Living Shanghai, My Perspective!

The other day I was dropping Tanker to his daycare. In his class Tanker pointed to one of his girl classmates and said to me in a big voice: “Daddy, Julia is my girl friend!” I was in one way a bit embarrassed but did not know what exactly to do with the situation. Instead I just vaguely responded to him “oh, they are all your friends…” Tanker is only 5 now, and I didn’t say the similar thing to my own Dad until I was almost 25!

This afternoon I had a 45-minute quarterly one-on-one meeting with Tanker’s lead teacher Ms. Wang to talk about Tanker’s progress and issues at school, and it turns out that Tanker’s close relationship with Julia at school has become a concern to his teachers and the principal. Ms Wang told me that not only Tanker and Julia always like to play together, but also they touch and hug a lot. Though Ms. Wang does agree that this relationship is completely out of innocence, she thinks it is time for us to work together starting to teach Tanker about individual privacies and boundaries between people, especially between the boys and girls.

Sue and I had a conversation on this issue after dinner while Tanker was playing his dump truck and trains in his room. We think we probably shall bear most of the blame because we sort of encouraged him to hug others when greeting or seeing off, like “Tanker, go give uncle Li a hug”, or “Tanker, go give auntie Ann a kiss on the cheek”, instead of shaking hands. Now that he is growing into a big boy, it’s time for a change. Basically we need to help Tanker understand that he needs to protect his own privacies as well as respect others. We need to lay out some ground rules for him to interact with other people as regarding to what are appropriate and what are off-limits, and build a good foundation for future education and conversation on this subject. From now on I think we need to know better of Tanker’s friends: who they are, why Tanker likes them, and what Tanker does with them in order to better understand Tanker’s social preference and to catch any wrong trend.

As far as whether Sue and I should hide more if not all our XOXO behaviors from Tanker, Sue thinks not in believing that Tanker ought to understand it is normal to express close affection within and only within the family. Another thing Sue pointed out that I strongly agree on is that we will need to spend more time to watch some his TV programs with him to add some grownup interpretations to his understanding of the stories, and also maybe to carry out some of those TV stories in the real life to establish some real life connection so that Tanker could really learn from what he is watching.

Anyhow, it seems that Tanker is no longer a little boy that we only need to care about his wellbeing and technical skill development (such as math, language, and physical) but rather it is time for us as parents to get more involved into his social living and development, and teach him more about rules and responsibilities of living in a society. We also think it is crucial for us as parents to work closely with the teachers and for Tanker as a student to develop more openness with his teachers for his questions and problems.