Jacqueline Koay: 'I think it is more important to teach children skills they will need in life
It was a little before noon on a Tuesday when 12-year-old Georgina Jean Perry greeted me at the front door of her home in Sri Hartamas, Kuala Lumpur. Minutes later, her mother Jacqueline Koay came downstairs and I could immediately see where Georgina gets her bearing from. At 45, Koay – dressed in a pair of denim cut-offs and a white cotton halter top – looks youthful and lean.
“She didn’t want to go to school today,” Koay says, referring to Georgina. “I don’t force her to go to school every day because, well, she learns a lot at home, anyway. Right now, she’s busy labelling the plants she recently planted in the garden with Ros, our maid who is a fantastic teacher. She teaches Georgina lessons that she would never learn at school like how to be resourceful.”
The mother of five – Georgina is the youngest – feels strongly that parenting means raising children to be self-reliant, resilient, resourceful, nurturing and responsible adults. Doing well academically? Well, that’s incidental.
“There are only 24 hours in a day. How would you want your children to spend their 24 hours? Packing formulas into their heads and memorising theorems which they won’t use later in their lives?
“I studied many things just to pass exams ... but if you ask me what Bernoulli’s principle is now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I think it is more important to teach children skills they will need in life … like how to build shelter or grow crops, and care for others.
“If you look outside, you will see the shelter that Georgina has built for her rabbits. Georgina’s father is a designer and he could have built a state-of-the-art pen for the animals but we felt it was important that she built one herself. It looks like a shack but it’s a start. She has learnt to build a home for her pets and nurture them ... this is a precursor to her being a good parent later on.”
Koay’s take on parenting is by no means conventional, but she believes wholeheartedly in her approach. She recently compiled her thoughts on parenting in Barefoot In The City, a book on “raising successful, free-range, organic kids” based on her close-to three decades of parenting.
“It’s not a prescriptive parenting book, really. It’s my manifesto on parenting. I just wanted to share my journey, to explain my philosophy and reflect, and to open eyes that are maybe a little jaded to the magic that surrounds us. And I wanted to reassure parents that despite my, perhaps, unconventional outlook and the alternative lifestyle my children have been brought up in, they have grown into beautiful and successful young adults who are living a life o f purpose,” explains the keen yoga practitioner and instructor who started Sun Yoga, an organisation with more than 500 teachers worldwide.
Koay’s journey into parenthood begun early, while she was living in England. “I became a mum at a very young age. (It was) by accident, not by choice or design. Thus, I didn’t have any ‘philosophy’ when I started. I just learnt by making mistakes along the way and made up the rules as I went along. No one person really influenced me but if I have to name a person, it would be my children’s father. I don’t think he had any philosophy or ideals or (followed any) textbooks either. He drew his parenting style from his own happy childhood and one basic idea, which is to give our children the happiest childhood we possibly can. Along the way, they have all learnt the important lessons in life, but our focus was, and is, on building magical times that shape them in adulthood,” says Koay who grew up in Britain.
“Georgina goes to a very good international school where the teachers are good and the sporting facilities are wonderful. But it’s not the school’s job to give her a value system or teach her how to live ... it’s up to us parents. Children learn all these life skills from other human beings ... never from books,” says Koay, whose four older children - the eldest being 28 – now live in Britain. Her three sons – Nicky, Kit and Jack – are working (as an investment banker, an officer in the British Navy and a property developer respectively) while her daughter Katarina is at university completing her degree.
In Barefoot In The City, Koay shares many stories about her children and their journey through childhood to illustrate her point of view. She writes about her son Kit who didn’t always complete his schoolwork or revisions on time because of his responsibilities at home, such as ferrying his sisters and brothers around to school, birthday parties, movies and such.
She tells the story of Jack who dropped out of university and was jobless for a while until he found his way and eventually secured a job he loves as a property developer; and Katarina who turned down the offer to read law at Yale University in favour of doing a degree in Religion and Geography.
“Nobody is good at everything,” Koay theorises. “But everybody is good at something. Every child is a champion at something ... it could be football, it could be numbers or the ability to draw. Or it could be something as offbeat as flipping beer mats. Anything. When a child is naturally good at something she is often happy doing it.
“Take Georgina, for example. She loves sports ... she plays football and is a Taekwondo champion. She goes for football training at five in the morning ... we don’t wake her up. In fact, she wakes us up because she wants to. I don’t believe in external discipline ... My father used to force me to practise the piano and I have my Grade Six certificate, but now, I don’t play. But Georgina is motivated because she loves to play,” she says.
Koay is aware that her ideas may be considered too radical by some and her style too lackadaisical. When her book was published last year, she received some positive feedback from readers but also some criticism.
“I received an email from one lady that really stuck in my mind. She said: ‘It is easy for you to preach your sort of life ... after all, you are an expat’s wife and live comfortably. My husband earns RM2,000 a month and I live in a small, ugly flat. And you tell me to plant flowers?’
“I told Malcolm, my partner, about this email and asked him what he thought and he reminded me of the times when we didn’t have money and had to live on a shoestring budget ... when we lived in a tiny council flat in Stockport, Manchester, and saved coupons and put out ads in home-exchange sites so that we could afford to go on holidays.
“We did raise our children on a tight budget but somehow we never allowed ourselves to be cowed by economic restraint.
“You don’t need bags of wealth to give your children a magical childhood. Malcolm’s father was a bus driver and his mother was a cleaner. Yet, his childhood was filled with memories of cycling in the Kent countryside, bus holidays with other bus drivers’ families, family dinners sitting down at makeshift tables, kicking football in the field next door,” she muses.
It’s all about a state of mind, and Koay’s barefoot ways have worked well for her family.
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