"You are a spoilt brat" - let's analyze that.

Hi guys, I love it when my articles provoke quite an argument in the comments section and sometimes the topic of discussion may move onto something else, thus inspiring me to write a new piece to address that other issue. In my last piece, I returned to the old theme of 'settlers vs maximizers' - the mindset of people who prefer to choose a simpler, more humble lifestyle vs those who are extremely ambitious and are hungry for more success. I did stumble upon a tricky issue - that is the way settlers sit very uncomfortably beside maximizers because, well, that's the very issue we will address in today's post. But let me begin with one of the phrases my mother was very fond of when scolding me as a child, she labeled me a 'spoilt brat' and I know what you're thinking - was I a spoilt brat? We have all seen plenty of Youtube videos of real spoilt brats throwing a tantrum in public - but was I one of them? No I wasn't far from it, not at all.

Well, allow me to tell you a bit more about my childhood. My parents were primary school teachers, we were not exactly poor but we weren't rich either - my parents were very careful with money. To illustrate this situation, I have fond memories of our old green sofa: my father had a very rich older brother and thus my uncle's damaged, second-hand sofa was still far nicer than anything we could afford to buy, so for years we used my uncle's sofa. My parents were ashamed of not being able to afford a better sofa. Of course, it was our secret, if I ever mentioned that it was a second-hand cast off, my parents would have been furious because it would have brought shame to the family. It was a strange situation to say the least for us as I knew my father's oldest brother was ridiculously rich, like he was a timber merchant who made millions every year and was even conferred the honorary title of 'Datuk' in Malaysia. Once I visited my uncle with my father when I was like 8 years old and whilst the two men were talking, I stumbled upon some of my uncle's holiday photographs - it was not like I was rifling through his drawers, they were literally just on the table and so I looked at them. My uncle was extremely rich and traveled all over the world for business (ironically, that's exactly what I do today) and I didn't say a word, but my facial expression was that of envy as I looked at the lovely photographs (yes this was years before we took photos on our phones - we used to take photos with a camera and than had real photographs to look at). I don't even think my uncle noticed me looking at those photos but my father got extremely angry when he caught me.

When we got home, my father accused me of being extremely rude and misbehaving, going through my uncle's personal things. I got one helluva beating for that and I didn't even know what I did wrong apart from looking at some photos which were already on a table. In hindsight, I know exactly what was going on - my father got jealous, it didn't help that my father was a humble primary school teacher who worked at the local primary school just a short walk from where we lived whilst my uncle was this multi-millionaire tycoon who was going on business trips all over the world. I was so well behaved I barely said a word in my uncle's house, but the way I looked at those photos must have made it clear to my father that I was fascinated by my uncle's life and my father couldn't deal with the fact that his own son had for that moment, felt that his uncle was a better man. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that my uncle probably earned 20 times what my father made, like we weren't that poor - it was just that my uncle was so insanely rich. It was not something my father would talk about with his children of course, but in hindsight it was obvious that he was insecure, bitter and extremely jealous of his brother. I was of course jealous of my cousins (my rich uncle's children), they had all the nicest clothes, expensive toys and could go on all these fancy holidays around the world. I figured out from a very young age that life wasn't fair - my cousins could have all these amazing things and I couldn't. I am embedding the video for "Papaoutai" (Papa where are you) below because it is a song that really captures the bitterness I feel towards my father - and of course it is in French, my second language given how I had turned my back on my dad's culture. If you can understand the lyrics, great and if not, the story is still told through dance and it is one of my favourite music videos.

So how did the label 'spoilt brat' come about? Well, my mother used that label to scold me when I was a kid, whenever I even talked about anything that was nice. Please, let me clarify: I most certainly wasn't the kind of kid who would ask my parents for expensive toys - quite simply because I knew I was never going to get it, my parents wouldn't spend that kind of money, so why bother asking if all you're going to get is a scolding and probably a beating to go with it? Let me give you an example, we are watching TV and we see an ad for Pizza Hut - so I make a remark like, 'oh that looks interesting' and that would be enough to make my mother angry. She would accuse me of being a spoilt brat, always making unreasonable demands on my parents to spend money on stupid things we don't need. It's not like we couldn't afford to go out for dinner, but my mother still had this 'working class with money' mentality, even if we weren't poor, she always felt that we should be very careful with our money just in case we ever became poor again hence even hinting that we should go to Pizza Hut was enough to warrant a scolding. My parents always accused me of being ungrateful for the things that I had been given as a child - but I honestly believe that this was misplaced. It wasn't that I was ungrateful, but I desired a better life for myself, I wanted to be in a position where I could take my family to a restaurant and say, "order anything you like, this is my treat" rather than be so worried about money you feel as if you can't even afford a pizza.

But of course, I was desiring for things my parents couldn't afford to provide me with on their humble teachers' salaries - for example, I read loads of atlases and encyclopedias as a child and I yearned to travel the world but that was simply not something that my parents could even begin to imagine. So when I was in primary school, my classmates would go to places like Australia, New Zealand, Japan and France on holiday whilst I had to be grateful I made it as far as Desaru. But then again, there was this other incident that taught me at an early age just how brutally unfair life actually is. Once during a Chinese lesson, a classmate asked the teacher how to write the word abalone in Chinese: 鲍鱼 and this kid in my class asked, "what's abalone?" At first we just thought that he must know only the Chinese word for it, but it turns out that this kid was so poor that eating abalone at Chinese new year was not something his family could afford, so he has never ever tasted abalone. There was this awkward moment when another clueless boy in the class said something like, "oh you must ask your mother to go buy some for you to eat, 鲍鱼 very nice one, 很好吃!" That was when the teacher, realizing what was going on, quickly told that clueless boy to shut up because it was clear that the majority of the class had simply taken eating abalone during Chinese new year for granted whilst for this one kid, through no fault of his own, it was just something his family could afford to do. That kid was born into a very poor family - so whose fault was that?

Oh it must be incredibly confusing for young kids to be confronted with such a situation whereby you simply can't have what your peers take for granted. Sure my parents were careful with money but even my father would always open a can of abalone during Chinese new year to celebrate as it was customary. There was always a classmate who had something your family just couldn't afford, but when I tried to ask my parents why I couldn't have that very same item that my classmate has, I was accused of being a demanding, ungrateful spoilt brat who had no right to ask for that item. So children like me were left to figure it out for ourselves, sometimes we gave in to our parents and actually believed that we were rotten kids who didn't deserve the same things that our peers got - whilst their parents showered them with shiny toys and expensive gifts, we got nothing but guilt from our parents for being so ungrateful. Well, the answer to this is very simple: how much you got as a child depended almost entirely on your parents' income. If you were lucky enough to have rich parents, then traveling to somewhere like America or Great Britain is something you can do on a regular basis rather than a once in a lifetime experience if you win a lucky draw. Yup, this is totally random and as unfair as it can get.

So if my parents were prepared to be totally honest with me, they would have said something like, "tough shit son, your parents are just humble primary school teachers, there's just no way you can expect us to buy you the kind of things that your uncle has managed to get for your cousins. Like he earns millions every year, probably every month whilst we have to give tuition just to make ends meet, so there's really no point in comparing as life is inherently unfair. You wanna be rich, well, then study hard, do well in school, go to a good university and maybe you can grow up to become like your uncle one day, so you won't be earning as little as a primary school teacher. Your uncle's a brilliant man, unfortunately we're not as smart as him, so whilst he can make millions running a highly profitable business, working as primary school teachers is just about all we can do and that's just the way it is going to have to be until you grow up, get a job and start earning your own money. But until then, perhaps the best thing to do is to accept things for what they are and be grateful for what we do have in life. Like you're naturally quite smart, you do well in school, that's the kind of thing that money can't buy - why not be grateful for the brains which you got from your parents eh? And you like sports so much, you're clearly good at gymnastics - why not be grateful for your natural ability in sports? You have so much to be grateful for."

Of course, my parents were never honest with me. They were deeply insecure, bitter and jealous - they would get really defensive and say things like, "what is wrong with being a teacher? We are so important, we work so hard and deserve the respect of everybody." You know, that kind of defensive talk. And if the issue of how much they earned every came up, they played the 'you're an ungrateful spoilt brat' card instead of having a rational conversation about why different adults in different professions earn different amounts of money. It's not rocket science: why is an Uber driver paid so little and a top brain surgeon paid so much? It is because of the barriers to entry: you need so little training to become an Uber driver whereas you need over ten years of training to become a brain surgery specialist - that can then lead to a sensible discussion about what the child wishes to do for a career and it can be a very rewarding discussion for the young person. But no, instead, my parents were just so insecure about how much (or little) they earned that they would shut that conversation down out of sheer fear that my father would be reminded that his big brother was a multi-millionaire timber merchant whilst he was just a humble primary school teacher and we had my uncle's old sofa in our living room. Talk about having the elephant in the room - this was the sofa in the room that nobody dared to talk about.

But here's the key problem with my parents' approach: they only saw things from their point of view. There was absolutely no attempt to try to understand what I experienced as a child at school in my interactions with other students. Of course my parents were trying their very best to provide for their children - they were school teachers with modest salaries, the money wasn't going to go that far with three children and hence there was often little left over for luxuries and treats. We weren't starving but we certainly not rich, well not like my rich uncle anyway. But look at it from my point of view for a moment: I went to school and saw other kids with rich parents who were able to buy them expensive toys, they lived in beautiful houses and traveled abroad regularly during the school holidays - I couldn't figure out why those rich kids 'deserved' all those nice things and I didn't. And when I even came close to asking for anything from my own parents, I was scolded and beaten for being a 'spoilt brat' - my parents would never admit that they were too poor to buy me those nice things that my classmates had, no. They would put the blame entirely on me and the message I got was that I was a rotten little shit who didn't deserve anything that the other good kids had. Because I told that because I was a 'spoilt brat', I was somehow morally deficient, I had let down my parents and thus that was the reason why others kids could have nice things, but I didn't deserve them. Now, is this the kind of message you want to give your young child?

Look, parents are usually pretty crap at a number of things such as talking to their children about sex and relationships, I've covered that a lot on my blog already. However, did it occur to you that many parents are also pretty shit at talking to their children about money? For my parents, it was just something they decided to make a taboo topic because of my father's uneasy relationship with his brother who was so much richer - talking about money made him upset so we just avoided the topic altogether. He wasn't emotionally mature enough to handle the situation, much less try to explain it to his children so as a consequence, I was pretty much left to figure all this out for myself with no help from my parents. I wonder if it is only rich parents who do talk about money openly with their children because for poorer parents, would they be as embarrassed as my parents when it comes to dealing with this topic? Would they be, for example, able to handle a question like, "why do you earn less money than my best friend's father? Why are they so much richer than us?" Well, children are curious and need answers but parents often have too much pride to admit the real reasons why they are not earning as much as the parents of their children's classmates at school. I think my father would be afraid of losing his credibility as the head of the family, therefore it was just a topic he chose to make taboo by beating us up should we ever try to talk about as kids. Heck, I have no problems talking about earning money on my blog, but guess what? I'm really quite rich like my late uncle, so my financial situation is a source of pride rather than embarrassment.

Is it impossible to explain difficult concepts to children? I don't think so - it is simply breaking it down in a way that children can learn about the issue, if you deem that children will never be able to understand and hence never bother to explain anything to them, then they will never learn. I roll my eyes when I hear Chinese parents say things like, "我们大人的事你不会明白" (you will not understand the issues for us adults) - no, it is not that children are too stupid to understand, but it's more a matter that the adult can't be bothered to explain or don't know how to explain it. The biggest irony of it all is that my parents were primary school teachers - it was their job to explain complex concepts to young children, to help them understand. In hindsight, it is pretty clear that they sucked as teachers as well because they couldn't do the one thing that primary school teachers were supposed to be able to do much better than anyone else. A good teacher should have enough empathy to try to see things from the child's point of view and help shape the explanation in a way that will be easily understood by the child.  Hey I work in corporate finance today, I don't talk to kids and I'm not sure I'll be any good at communicating difficult concepts to children - but surely a primary school teacher should be the kind of person who would know how to do something like that. Thankfully, I am able to reconcile all that and come to terms with what happened in the past; but I can't help but think about how much damage they have inflicted on my two sisters who have rarely ever questioned my parents' parenting methods. No - my two sisters are too Asian for their own good I'm afraid.

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue. What is your definition of a spoilt brat? Have you been labelled a spoilt brat when you were a child? Did you think that was a fair accusation or was it simply an excuse your parents used to deflect blame from their own shortcomings? How do you feel about spoilt brats though - do you blame the parents? After all, if the kids knew that throwing a tantrum would not get them what they wanted, they simply wouldn't try throwing tantrums - they would only use it as a tactic if they knew it worked. Children aren't that stupid, after all: it is time we hold parents to account instead. So let me know what you think, please do leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.