Welcoming strains and stresses in Primary 1

As parents, we can sometimes be too eager to sweep aside any obstacles in our child's path. It may be better to take a step back

- Tham Yuen-C

The night before my child started Primary 1, I was up late preparing the things he would need for his first day of school.

Having procrastinated on reading a to-do list sent out a week before, it only fully dawned on me then that everything he would be taking to school would have to be labelled.

So I stuck his name on his water bottle, a ruler, an eraser, a sharpener, a glue stick, an A3-sized folder, a watercolour palette, a pair of scissors, and even each of three paint brushes.

Then I came to the box of 28 coloured pencils and the box of 48 oil pastels, and I wasn't sure what to do.

It seemed excessive to have to label every single pencil and pastel stick.

When I asked friends and family members who also had children starting school the next day, I found they had done just that, and decided I would attempt to do it too.

But the transparent name labels that a friend kindly printed for us turned out unsuitable, as the pencil shafts were too dark and the name could not be seen. I also could not imagine peeling off and sticking 76 narrow stickers on 76 narrow items.

And when I tried to scribble my child's initials on the pencils and the wrappers of the oil pastels, the result was just illegible.

In the end, I just stuck a name label on each box, since there were other things to do, like forms to fill up, photos to print, and instructions to read about uniforms and the orientation programme.

The entire exercise left me mildly annoyed and amused.

As it turned out, I was also to have labelled his shoes. Were kids really routinely losing their footwear in school?

A few days later, while relating this to a friend who had been a parent-volunteer at his child's school, I was told kids had to remove their shoes before going into the library, and would sometimes end up wearing the wrong shoes when they left.