Post migration issues

[neddy]

Generally many people migrate to provide their kids a headstart.

Aussie Thoughts

Ever thought what if kids get into trouble?

Today's kids are faced with so many challenges.

1. What if they are not used to their new school environment or classmates?

Fortunately, when kids are young, they get used to the new environment easily. There may be occasional fights at school because of the Singapore accent. Chances of bully are present too, I am not surprised that it is the Singapore kids who are the bullies - judging from the number of times my relatives have to meet up the school teachers.

And then ... kids grow up

2. How to deal with drug issues? I know a Singapore kid who tried weeds - he stayed over a friend's place and older brother was using a bong. He curious so tried once.

OK. Singapore is a "clean" place, parents may not even know how drugs look like, let alone talk to their kids. I used to be 100% against any form of illicit drugs until I realise that tobacco is also a drug. I cannot explain away the mental & health issues caused by smoking tobacco, so I decided to find out more about drugs.

But so the Singapore "kid" tried weeds, and know how to use a bong

There are 2 good outcomes from this. phew!
2.1 He thinks it is not cool
2.2 He is not going to try weeds again or experiment with schedule 8 (I think it is 8 anyway) drugs - eg heroin,cocaine or party drugs, XTC, purple, Meth, etc

Reason: He wouldn't talk to his parents on certain things but he will talk to my partner these little secrets knowing that she will not betray him. So, it is a relief that Singapore kid has someone to confide in and my partner will provide the appropriate guidance.

I think parents will be relieved to know that son is not finding out mis-information from internet or friends, but my partner and I will not let them know that their son is in good hands. In order not to betray Singapore kid.

It is important to realise that the world does not fall down when parents find out their kids are experimenting with drugs. It is important to know what kind of drugs are involved and whether they have serious consequences.

It does not matter where the person live. In high society suburbs like Nedlands and Dalkeith, drugs use are still present. Of course it is best if kids do not know or see drugs, but it is not easy to shield kids. Best to educae them.

In Perth, there is even a dedicated Parent's Drug information program to support parents. Nationally, there is a family support line. These people are good because they are set up by people who lost kids through drugs and want to help others.

http://www.druginfo.adf.org.au/contact-numbers/help-and-support





Real story below.
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WA top cop says he loves his jailed son
By Angie Raphael, AAP
September 2, 2011, 4:57 pm
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West Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan says it is a "tough day" for him as a father after his son was sentenced to 16 months in prison over a drug lab explosion.

Russell Joseph O'Callaghan, 30, was sentenced in the Perth District Court on Friday after pleading guilty in April to attempting to manufacture the prohibited drug methamphetamine.

O'Callaghan was arrested and charged following a clandestine drug lab explosion on March 20 at a Department of Housing unit at Carlisle, in Perth's south, in which he and four others suffered burns.

Two children, aged three and four, escaped injury.

O'Callaghan spent more than two weeks in hospital for treatment to burns to his head, shoulders and arms.

Two other men were charged with similar offences and their cases are still before the Magistrates Court.

Mr O'Callaghan told reporters on Friday that he had seen "enormous" progress by his son, who had become a mentor for other drug addicts.

"He has made some enormous steps forward in the past few months and he needs to continue to move in that direction if he's going to return to a normal life," the commissioner said.

Mr O'Callaghan said he had last spoken with his son on Thursday night over the phone and said he was "in a good space" ahead of sentencing.

"The last thing I said to him was that `I love you' and I said that because we both knew that there was a very high possibility that he would go to prison today," he said.

Mr O'Callaghan said he hoped his son could continue to receive treatment in prison so that he did not relapse.

He said that, as police commissioner, he believed it was an "appropriate" sentence for what was a "very dangerous and foolish" act.

During sentencing submissions on Thursday, O'Callaghan's lawyer Mark Andrews told the court his client had an on-off addiction to drugs which began in his teenage years.

Mr Andrews said O'Callaghan's father had tried to "effectively rescue" his son in 2009 by inviting him to stay in his home as long as he severed ties to his former drug associates, but O'Callaghan eventually relapsed.

He said O'Callaghan had a "relatively peripheral role" in the offence by driving the group to a chemist to buy cold and flu tablets and did not actually manufacture the drugs.

In sentencing on Friday, Judge Felicity Davis said she accepted that O'Callaghan was producing the drugs for his own use and not for commercial gain.

The judge also accepted that O'Callaghan had cooperated with police and was remorseful, even suffering from post-traumatic stress.

However, she said the offence was too great to warrant a suspended prison sentence.

"As you know from your own experience, it (methamphetamine) is a dangerous and addictive drug," Judge Davis told O'Callaghan.

She said the need for general deterrence was important because illegal drug laboratories posed a serious danger in the community and "people must be deterred from bringing it (drugs) into existence".

O'Callaghan had his sentence reduced by six months after he agreed to testify against two other men allegedly involved in the attempted manufacture of the drug.

Judge Davis ordered that O'Callaghan be eligible for parole after eight months.

Outside court, Mr Andrews said he was confident O'Callaghan would continue his rehabilitation.

"He's made great strides in that regard already and I have no reason to believe that he won't continue this as best he can during his period of incarceration and thereafter," he said.

Mr Andrews said the sentence handed down to O'Callaghan should serve as a warning to others.

 

[neddy]

I need to add that the reason why this Singapore kid confide in my partner (fiancée), is because he has a crush on her.

Coming to the Part 2 of my sharing here.

3. With all the online porn, kids are getting really mixed up with entertainment and reality.

My partner is trying to advise Singapore kid how to get a proper girlfriend and correct his thinking about "hooking up with babes", "giving heads" and "knocking up" strangers. It is all about giving respect to women. There is also a difference between fantasy and real life. Who know, it may even progress to teaching him the flirting tricks women are up to, so that he will not fall for them. (Good thing my partner is well-schooled in Japan (she is Japanese) - Japs are NOT dumb and bad in maths)

Yes, also telling Singapore kid not to touch her inappropriate areas when she is giving out hugs.

I guess in conservative asian Singapore, parents do not really teach kids properly and school may not educate properly as well. That is why kids get into trouble when they go excursions, national service and/or overseas studies.

Most Aussies I know do not think we should decriminalise oral sex. Surprised but not surprise.

Also, women here tend to spend more time with kids, over 60% of female colleagues at my workplace choose to be part-timers, working 2 to 3 days per week and they leave work at 3:30pm.

This also has to do with Australian view of working women, different from Singaporean view of working women. Will post more on this topic some other time.

 

[neddy]

This article highlight the difference between working women in Singapore and Australia.

* In short: Singapore women feel social pressure to work and society create an environment for working women. Aussie women feel the stress of work-family balance because work is a choice for them *

Author: Rebecca Turner
Publication: The Deal
Edition: 1
Section: Magazine
Keywords:

Rebecca Turner on the big role played by cultural pressures in defining women's work.

Seize the day! Follow your dreams! Commencement speeches at American universities, for which high achievers such as the Bills Gates and Clinton are brought in to rally the troops, are often so littered with inspirational messages that they lose their potency.

That's why it was so refreshing to hear Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg eschew the "reach for the stars" rhetoric in a recent address to graduating women at Barnard College in New York. Instead, she gave a sobering talk on how her generation had failed professional women. "Women became 50 per cent of the college graduates in this country in 1981. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50 per cent of the jobs at the top," she said.

But this wasn't a "the system is against us" speech. The main problem was women themselves, Sandberg said. Even before they had children, or a partner, they were making the small decisions to plan for balanced family and working lives 10 or 20 years later. It might be a choice not to pursue a partnership in their firm or tackle a challenging medical specialty because they might want to raise children one day. "Do not lean back; lean in," Sandberg, a mother of two, said. "Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That's the only way, when that day comes, you'll even have a decision to make."

This month's research survey supports Sandberg's argument that women in the US, and other Western countries, are held back due to real or anticipated family obligations.

An article by four Curtin University researchers shows that in cultures where women are expected to work, the stress of work-family balance disappears. Indeed, Htwe Htwe Thein, Siobhan Austen, Janice Currie and Erica Lewin found that work-family balance was not a significant issue for working women in Hong Kong and Singapore. In those countries, women who worked were seen as making a sacrifice to help the family economically, in contrast to places such as the US and Australia, where working women were seen as failing to meet their obligation to look after their families.

As in many Western countries, Singapore and Hong Kong have low fertility rates, ageing populations and governments that are trying to encourage more women to work. So they were considered ideal for testing how different cultural contexts affected women's workplace participation. For the study, reported in the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, the researchers interviewed 80 women aged between 25 and 45, mostly full-time professionals. The majority had a tertiary education and less than one third of them had children.

The key cultural difference between these women and their Australian counterparts, argue the authors, was that the Asian women reported feeling strong social pressure to work. Their families expected to be supported, especially if a lot of time and money had been invested in the women's education. Their materialistic societies demanded that they work hard and own the latest luxury goods. In exchange, their female relatives - with the help of domestic staff - would take on the job of childcare, showing that, culturally, children are still seen as a woman's responsibility. But because families were so involved in the care of their grandchildren, the researchers argue that any government measures to boost workplace participation, such as promoting flexible hours and increasing childcare places, are unlikely to be successful.

While these women seem to have an enviable situation - free family childcare, cheap domestic help and no problems with work-family balance - they did mention that their career aspirations had been hampered because they couldn't work the extremely long hours needed to reach the top.



Some workers looking for more balance in their lives often fantasise about a 50-50 set-up, in which both parents work part-time and share the domestic duties equally. This model of redressing the gender imbalance at a household level was tested by Norwegian sociologist Erik Gronseth in the 1970s and a new article published in Community, Work & Family has followed up on his results several decades on.

Author Tone Schou Wetlesen wanted to know if the children of Gronseth's participants had taken the same approach with their own families. Despite good memories of their childhoods, most reported juggling their work and family lives using the mainstream model, with at least one parent in full-time work.

Under Gronseth's model, followed for an average of five years by the families studied, each spouse worked between 16 and 28 hours a week. At the time, it was hailed as a success, with reports of equality in domestic work (as well as domestic power) and better relationships between parents and children. Marriages were also happier and there were few divorces.

However, despite the equality, some families still reported problems in juggling the needs of home and work. "When you have two different jobs, working 50 per cent becomes very fragmented and you feel rather insufficient," one participant said. "You want to be fully present when at home or at work."

The children were mostly positive about their experiences and shared their parents' views on gender issues, even if they found it difficult to put into practice in their own lives. Many reported having to compromise these values to meet the expectations of employers or partners with more traditional upbringings. This reflects the power of broader cultural pressures.



REFERENCES

"The Impact of Cultural Context on the Perception of Work/Family Balance by Professional Women in Singapore and Hong Kong", Htwe Htwe Thein, Siobhan Austen, Janice Currie and Erica Lewin, International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, Vol 10, No 3.

"Balancing Work and Childcare - The Legacy of a Gender Equality Experiment", Tone Schou Wetlesen, Community, Work & Family, Vol 13, No 4.

 

[neddy]

After long exposure to Aussie politics, I am already wise up to what Singaporean politicians are up to.
Singapore politics is scary, very very scary.

I smell a rat in this website esp. http://www.facebook.com/FabricationsAboutThePAP

Eg "Why Stop at 2 - The facts" topic.
It leaves me with more questions than answers. But no point shooting my questions here since I am not after an intellectual discussion.

But Singapore is a wonderful country for the ignorant, clueless and unthinking residents.

I am willing to bet that CPF is a ponzi scheme. In fact, the fractional reserve banking system it is based on is deeply flawed.
Even if Singaporeans are right that governments around the world are worse than Singapore's, Singapore is too small to be immune to the bad decisions of these governments.

Singapore government did made good (easy) decisions in the past because of the talented dedicated group of people developing the country. Today, it is difficult to put in those easy decisions or to review those decisions such as repelling the "Stop At 2".

 

[Ash007]

Thanks for the sharing. In short, there are no real answers as to work or not for mums. I personally think that the society pressure for working mums is causing the low fertility rate in Singapore. Until this changes, I suppose the birth rate will continue to decline.

 

[kingrant]

I think not only that. Many couples have seen the benefits in having a small family. they get to have fewer members to share with, so that each has more. Whoever thinks of having babies for the sake of the country? It has always been a personal affair between the couple. What the govt shld have done was to adopt more subtle methods to bring back the concept of a bigger family. Instead, what did it do? Come out with idiotic elitist programs like grad mum, child qualifying tax reliefs, and harping on it every NDR. No wonder it pissed people off.

Thanks for the sharing. In short, there are no real answers as to work or not for mums. I personally think that the society pressure for working mums is causing the low fertility rate in Singapore. Until this changes, I suppose the birth rate will continue to decline.

 

[neddy]

Thanks for the sharing. In short, there are no real answers as to work or not for mums. I personally think that the society pressure for working mums is causing the low fertility rate in Singapore. Until this changes, I suppose the birth rate will continue to decline.

Research in India has shown that educated women tend to marry later and have less kids - and equal treatment for daughters. This is observed in Communist-rule Kerala state (Literacy: 99%), compared to north-eastern state of Bihar (Literacy for women: 50%)

 

[neddy]

Post migration talk - Australian Politics

For Singaporeans who think the Government is everything.

WTF?

In Australia, the politics is politics. A lot of noise, nothing much to take heart to. Even if they affect your life, you cannot change them, - why not just take actions to change things within your control.

The mass media are there to make money and more eyeballs means more revenue. Don't believe everything.

Believing too much will end the reader into a political tragic, depressed and suicidal. m

I know this Kiwi who hates Helen Clark. Hey, she is no longer PM, for goodness sake, move on.

Things happen in politics because we the clueless voters put them there.

There are not many adults in Federal Govt. This guy is one of them.

The rest are - well - overgrown kids. esp the "leaders".

I am told that Japan used to have a government that is almost perfect. Too bad, they are still looking for a replacement perfect PM, the 6th one in the last 5 years.

 

[IWC2006]

Research in India has shown that educated women tend to marry later and have less kids - and equal treatment for daughters. This is observed in Communist-rule Kerala state (Literacy: 99%), compared to north-eastern state of Bihar (Literacy for women: 50%)

I don't think this is unique just in Spore, even in western countries couples are either not having kids or having less. The same issues experienced in Sg is happening in Oz - high cost of living, stressful worklife, no family support/expensive to hire nanny, no time for kids etc. The difference is in Oz employers are more tolerant and practise work-life balance but in Sg employers only preach but not acting on it. However, in OZ other than the baby bonus, they have less worried about replenising population due to it's highly popular immigration policy(most migrated to Australia because they want a better life for their kids anyway), and many couples have de-factor relationships (some are not waiting for traditional marriage to have kids) means they have sex more) whereas in Sg many 'offsprings' are born out of the teenage lust bangwagon which is really not healthy to the society.

In the west young couples live together(mostly rent) is no big deal but in Sg people are more conservative and pressure from parents and of course those stupid HDB rules means many would not be able to live together until they tie the knob (by the time they save up will be EITHER too old to have kids or they rather not have it)

There you go, on one hand you'll create a open-society but still want to retain the traditional values - there's no way around it. Hence gov had not choice but resort to 'import' FTs to fill up the country population (hopefully along the way some would take up citizenships) but we all know those stay back are bad bags from 3rd world countries.

 

[neddy]

Someone asked if Perth weather is good for making beauties, including Miss Australia 2011

Even 2009 is a good looker.

Samara Tugwell

And who can forget Jessica Gomes.

 

[neddy]

New employment Buzzwords

4 DAY WORK WEEK
http://www.news.com.au/business/you...lab-shows-us-how/story-fn9evb64-1226148768876

CREATE YOU OWN JOB
http://www.news.com.au/business/wor...ce-of-the-future/story-e6frfm9r-1226144532603

EMPLOYMENT OUTLOOK
http://www.news.com.au/business/wor...est-of-australia/story-e6frfm1i-1226151720887

 

[neddy]

Down with hayfever - guess I spent too long in OZ.

This Singaporean I know thought he was having fever and used panadol, but he still feel very uncomfortable until a Malaysian doctor asked - Have you heard of hayfever?
He thought - that's it. It's hayfever springtime.

 

[neddy]

GET MC FROM CHEMISTS

In Australia, in general, you do not need to provide a med cert if you are on sickie for up to 2 days.

But sometimes, it is not possible to get an appointment from a bulk-billed doctor (on leave or busy) or you do not want to pay out-of-pocket expenses for a co-payment doctor for minor ailment - what do you do?

My friend visits her regular chemist who will issue sickie free-of-charge to regular customers. (She buy high-blood pressure medication from this same chemist for her parent)

My understanding is that many chemists do not feel confident about issuing sickies to just any customers who buy pharmacist medication (for fear of being duped). But if you have a regular chemist, s/he may provide this service for you. You will need to ask, because this is extra work for the chemist. (Unless s/he is prepared to charge a fee)

Your doctor will not tell you this service, because they do not like chemists to provide this service.

Chemist's MC is allowed under Australian Law.

Chemists also provide Witnessing of Documents for free, or in some cases, charge $5-10 for non-regular customers. Something for new migrants to take note of.

 

[ZorrorroZ]

Chemist's MC is allowed under Australian Law.

Chemists also provide Witnessing of Documents for free, or in some cases, charge $5-10 for non-regular customers. Something for new migrants to take note of.

Interesting! Thanks for the tip!

 

[neddy]

chemist MC - update

A friend went to this same chemist and he want to charge $20 for a 1-day MC!!
He earns around $100 per hour, so $20 is peanuts to him! He asked for 2 days ($40?) but can only get 1 day.

"guanxi" is very important here for good deals.