Lessons in parenting from a 'scary' roller coaster

We're influenced more than we think by our own upbringing. But some things are better left in the past.

- Lianne Chia

It was our first day at Hong Kong Disneyland, and my four-year-old son was beaming from ear to ear.

He was finally over the minimum height limit for almost all the rides and was looking forward to exploring everything the park had to offer. It was a good attitude to take, we reasoned - after all, we'd shelled out a pretty penny to be here, and we wanted to maximise our time and investment.

But as we walked through the different zones, surrounded by the clatter of roller coasters and the shrieks of children, I found myself mentally categorising each ride as either safe or scary.

Safe: trains, carousels, flying elephants and anything that didn't go too fast or have any sudden dips or sharp drops. Scary: everything else.

From childhood, this has practically been second nature to me: It could be a family-friendly roller coaster with children half my age clambering on in glee, the historic wooden roller coaster in Melbourne's Luna Park or the much-vaunted Battlestar Galactica ride at Universal Studios Singapore. They were, very simply, "scary".

Then, I unthinkingly used that very word to describe the ride we were queueing up for, and I saw my son's excited grin falter.

What kind of message was I sending to my son, who'd never been on a roller coaster before, and had no idea what to expect?

THE POWER OF OUR UPBRINGING It wasn't a huge incident, but it made me question why I thought of these rides as "scary" in the first place. The answer, I soon concluded, lay in my upbringing.

I grew up in a risk-averse household, and my mother would shudder whenever we visited theme parks and heard the screams of riders on the looping roller coasters. "So scary," she would mutter, as we watched them from the safety of the ground.

Yes, I could have gone on them if I had wanted to. Of course, I never did.