Moments spent with your children are priceless

Monday June 22, 2009

Monday Starters - By Soo Ewe Jin

WE celebrated Father’s Day yesterday. So it is a good time to talk about fathers.

More so after I read an interesting comment by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times recently entitled “Poor children of the rich and succesful”.

It was the last few paragraphs that caught my attention.

“Sacrifices generally have to be made for unusual success – whichever career path you follow,” Johnson wrote.

“And for those inventors and corporate pioneers whose life is their business, then it is all too clear where their ultimate priorities lie.

“Yet almost every entrepreneur I have known regrets not spending enough time with their children when they were growing up.”

My eldest son has just started work at the college he graduated from.

Compared with what I earned on my first job as a cadet reporter in the now defunct National Echo, he can certainly give me a treat when he gets his first pay cheque at the end of the month.

I am glad that he does not think that making lots of money is the most important thing in life.

Of all the things I have given, or not given to my two boys, one thing they cannot complain about is my time with them.

When the eldest one was in Standard One, I did a crazy thing. I exited the workforce and became a full-time father. My wife and I decided to have at least one parent in the home full time, and it began with me.

We have clocked up 16 years of being full-time homemakers. Our well-meaning friends, especially financial planners and unit trust consultants, like to talk about our foregone income.

They tell us that the reason we cannot send our children for an overseas education is that we did not build up our financial nest when we were most able to.

A common lament: “Why did you not earn when you were in the prime of your working life?”

That was good advice, but we chose to walk a different path. It is certainly not the definitive way for all parents to take, but we found it was the road that gave us huge dividends.

Somehow, one income, and a bit here and there with our freelance efforts, was more than enough to see us through.

But how does one put a price on time? How do you measure those moments of bonding with your children in their growing-up years?

Whether you are a CEO or a manual worker, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. I reckon if we were to divide our monthly salary by the number of hours in a month, we roughly know how much our time is worth per hour.

I got an email the other day about a boy who wanted to borrow US$25 from his ever-busy father who earns US$50 an hour.

“Daddy, I have US$50 now. Can I buy an hour of your time? Please come home early tomorrow. I would like to have dinner with you,” he said.

Well, some may dismiss this as just one of those feel-good email that make their rounds to make one feel guilty about spending too much time away from home.

The song Cat in The Cradle comes to mind. Made famous in 1974 by Harry Chapin, the song is told in first-person by a father who is too busy to spend time with his son.

And, eventually, the boy grew up just like him – a busy man who also does not have time for his father.

Time. It’s priceless.

● Deputy executive editor Soo Ewe Jin feels the balance sheet of life goes way beyond profit and loss and workers should not be treated as mere economic units.