What I could not do at 21

When I was 21 and at Harvard, my aunt sent me home with a frozen chicken to roast in my dorm.

I called my mother for instructions. Wash it, season it, put it in the oven. I cooked rice. I sat down to eat. The chicken was inedible — too salty, too dry — so I gave up and went out for dinner.

Two weeks later my mother was talking to my aunt on the phone and complained that the aunt should not send raw chicken to a boy who could not cook. My aunt, confused, replied: "What raw chicken? It was already cooked."

In my defence, my aunt's cooking was generally not great, and the frozen albino-looking thing looked raw to me.

I grew up in Hong Kong in a household where my mother did everything. I focused on studies. I never learned to organise a drawer, do laundry, tell raw food from cooked. I was 21 years old at Harvard and I could not feed myself.

I think about this often when I watch parents in Singapore today.

We have one child per family on average. We have helpers. We have all the means to remove every chore, every inconvenience, every life skill from our child's day so they can focus on studies. There was a famous Singapore news story years ago of a National Service man whose helper carried his army backpack for him on enlistment day. Most of us laughed. The story bothered me because I had been that boy.

Independence is what we call self-help skills — one of the four things I want every child to leave preschool with. The other three are academic skills for school, people skills for society, and future skills for what we cannot yet predict.

You cannot buy independence. You cannot tuition it. You have to let your child do the small things — set their own breakfast, pack their own bag, manage their own time — even when it is faster to do it for them.

Especially when it is faster to do it for them.

What is one thing you have stopped doing for your child this year?