Grade expectations: ‘I sailed through school so why is my son struggling?’

Parent and lecturer Ian Tan found studying easy and expected his son to perform equally well at school. When the boy struggled, this dad found himself unprepared and mistakenly imposed his own expectations and experiences on his son.

* AI-generated artwork courtesy of writer

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In 2012, I was part of Our Singapore Conversation, a massive nationwide exercise to hold dialogue sessions with 47,000 Singaporeans to shape the country’s future. I was sitting in a group dialogue session and the topic was about the local education system.

An elderly man in the group struck up a conversation with me and asked about my fatherhood journey.

I shared with him that my then nine-year-old son’s school grades were getting worse and I didn’t know what to do. I had tried everything from coaching him to encouraging him, and it often ended up with me scolding him harshly.

The man asked gently, “What is your definition of a good grade in school?”

I replied, “Umm, about 85 marks?”

He smiled and said, “Who defined that number for you?”

I was dumbstruck. You see, I had grown up getting what I would consider good grades at every stage of my education path and so thought of anything lower than that as “bad”.

From the time we had streaming in Primary 4 until the day I completed junior college, I was always in the top few classes in school.

In university, I was awarded a scholarship with Singapore Press Holdings and graduated as the valedictorian of my faculty.

I expected my first child to follow in my academic footsteps. I assumed he just needed to be conscientious and study hard like I did and he would get the grades to succeed in life.

But after the initial easy years of Primary 1 and 2, I could not fathom why my son was struggling in his studies.

I tried to teach him subjects like Maths but I would end up scolding him out of frustration and anger.

My son did not like to revise what he had studied, which I believed was a bad habit and the cause of his poor grades. I ended up scolding him more and more. He became sadder and quieter as the months went by. 

Then one day, I was struck by a realisation.

I was overseas for work and sitting alone in my hotel room.

I thought about everything I had been doing with regards to my son’s studies and all the harsh things I had said to him at the study table. My heart broke as I thought of his forlorn face. The elderly man was right. I had been defining my son’s grades by my own past success. The more his grades slipped, the more I became angry with my son, because my unspoken, egoistic dream of “cloning” myself was not coming true.

I immediately called my wife and told her I would back off from trying to teach our son and I would no longer demand he achieve a certain grade in his subjects. 

Since that day, I have reflected more deeply on my own past to understand where I had gone wrong as a father.

Different definitions of success

My father passed away when I was a baby and my mother raised me as a single parent.

She had impressed upon me since I was in Primary 1 that I had to do well in school so that I could avoid her fate of being a struggling breadwinner. So, I did everything I could to make her proud — and that was by bringing home good grades and always competing to be among the best scorers.

During my junior college days, I observed that there were other schoolmates who put in more hours of studying than I did but did not fare as well.

I wondered at the time if it was because I was born with a more academic mind or whether it was because I had been pushing myself to succeed since I was seven years old.

As I later realised, I started out with an advantage when I was born without learning difficulties.

My son did not fare well for the rest of his primary and secondary school days and when he was in Secondary 4, his teacher asked us to check with a doctor.

The teacher said my son was exhibiting traits of learning difficulties. That thought had never really crossed my mind and I had just assumed that he was not motivated to study hard.

A doctor diagnosed him as having learning disabilities, which made it difficult for him to deal with mathematical reasoning as well as abstract concepts in his Humanities subjects.

This was why he was suffering silently all these years.     

When we received the diagnosis, I was devastated, because I had grievously wronged him all this time.

While I had stopped measuring what success was for him, it never occurred to me that there was an underlying medical issue that was not his fault.

I hugged him and apologised to him through my tears. It was a life-changing moment because I realised that I had to stop judging other people by my own standards of success.

I then began to change the way I managed people at work.

Instead of getting upset with them if they did not do their work well, I would ask if they were facing any issues that were hindering them. Perhaps the work was too unfamiliar, or their skills were not the right fit.

Now, as a university lecturer, I have learned how to scaffold my teaching so that students of different learning abilities can follow my lessons easily, and my door is always open to them if they need help.

Where I used to be very tough on myself as a student, I now know that not every student approaches learning in the same way.

Reflecting on my journey, I see how the push for excellence in Singapore shaped my own success in school, but blindly adhering to it proved detrimental to my son and our relationship.

If your child is struggling in school, take time to understand why.

Sometimes, their real problem might be us, their parents.