My Mistake on Jerome

I have 3 kids now, and I do not have plan for more, finger crossing. Not that I don't like kids, is just the stress and burden on me is already too much.

My eldest, Jerome, is 9 years old this year. He is studying in SJI Junior. Don't ask me about his academic stuff, sigh... I'm a failure...

From Jerome, I'd learnt about early education is a must in today's Singapore environment. We always thought that childhood should be carefree and children will eventually learnt when they are in school, but we did not realize that Jerome's character is much too laid back, can't be bothered and that the school nowsaday expect children to be already know the subjects and the teacher will just enhance the learning... teach less... and kids like Jerome will learn even lesser.

2nd mistakes we had made on Jerome is that we pulled him out of childcare during his kindergarten period. He stayed home most of the day, kindergarten is only 3-4 hours, doing nothing but watch TV and TV and TV. Nobody in the house can teach him (I was still working then) and supervise him. Worse, he do not listen to the grandparents.

When he started P1, we were both rather busy with work and most of the time, I'll just supervise him on daily homework and nothing else. On top of that, he is very weak in both spelling and 听写, hence time were spent on that. We had got a shock, or should say wake up call, when we received his CA1 results. He failed his English!!! He cannot even read the instructions. My hubby, being English educated and definitely better in English then me, immediately act on it and drilled Jerome on his reading capability. Eventually he improved and SA1 was fine.

As his results were not too bad, not Band 1 though, we did not push too hard on him as he is the type that cannot be pushed too much. He went through P1, managed through P2... and now the disaster P3.

I'm at a lost how to pull him back...