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Mon, Sep 06, 2010
The New Paper
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Kiasu? We just want the best for our kids
by Joanne Soh

ARE Singaporean parents becoming too kiasu?

Not particularly, said Mr William Toh.

The 44-year-old IT professional should know.

He is one of the founders of Kiasuparents.com, a networking website where mums and dads share their parenting experiences.

“Being a kiasu parent is just being an involved parent, someone who wants the best for them (the children),” Mr Toh told The New Paper on Sunday.

To him, parents who join registration queues for kindergartens for their unborn child or make their children take Gifted Education Programme (GEP) preparatory courses “just want to give their children that extra edge”.

And it was precisely to provide that extra edge that MrToh set up Kiasuparents.com.

The father of two children aged 11 and 5, joked that he created the portal “to find out what other parents in Singapore are doing for their kids and to make sure I can keep up with them”.

Set up in September 2007, Kiasuparents.com is the brainchild of Mr Toh, Mr Yip See Wai, 37, and Ms Chan Ching Ming, 37. All three hold full-time jobs. Mr Yip is also an IT professional and Ms Chan is a designer.

Explained Mr Toh: “We wanted to provide a platform where parents can provide feedback on the different kinds of enrichment services available to help other parents weed out the bad ones.”


Word of mouth

In six months, the site saw 50 active members.

Word of mouth from “parents to teachers to principals” helped the website grow.
“We now have over 26,000 active members,” said Mr Toh, who credits the growth to one of the site’s most popular topics – the primary school registration exercise.
Content on the website, said Mr Toh, is generated by the community.

“We are blessed with members who are more than willing to share their insightful parenting experiences.

“Parents who come to the website don’t get advice from experts with doctorates. They get it from people who have been through similar experiences. How do you beat that?”

Mr Toh and his partners then pick on the more frequently discussed topics and build on them.

The heavily-discussed primary school registration exercise resulted in the formation of the KiasuParents’ Guide to Primary School Education section, a key feature of the website.

“What we want to do is to educate new parents on the different phases of school registration and offer historical data on the various school balloting trends,” said Mr Toh.

He explained that such knowledge will keep parents informed of their chances early in the registration phases and “they can activate their back-up plans if necessary”.

For this reporter, the information on primary school registration has been very helpful.

Now I know I will need to subject myself or my spouse to 40 hours of parental voluntary service at the school of our choice to improve our chances of getting our son enrolled there.

Information on school education definitely forms the core topics in the forum.

A quick look and one will see forum threads on PSLE, Direct School Admissions Exercises, GEP, and even exchanges on how to solve certain mathematics and science questions.

A parent who wanted to be known only as Mrs Zhang, 31, likes the parents’ networking thread on the forum as she gets to compare notes with other parents who have children in her elder son’s primary school.

The mother of two also scours the trading post section for second-hand educational products.

“The website is definitely helpful. It saved me a lot of time in my search for a pre-school for my younger son. I just enrolled him in the school recommended by one of the parents,” added Mrs Zhang.

Another regular Kiasuparents.com user, who wanted to be known only by the alias KSI, said she uses the website “to keep myself updated with the kind of maths, science and English questions children faced in school”.

The mother of an eight-year-old daughter believes that is even better than reading assessment books.

This article was first published in The New Paper.

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