A Parent's Story

Why We Moved To Singapore

 

I’m a mom of two wonderful children; Alyssa and Ben who have ASD.  Alyssa is in her mid teens and Ben is three years younger, a perfectly planned age gap and heavenly pregnancies with no morning sickness.   We were very ready parents who had pursued our careers overseas, were financially comfortable and had practiced parenting skills on a dog before taking the “plunge”.  When we had our babies we were not too old by today’s standards, though both were caesareans due to my small pelvis.   When each, first Alyssa and then Ben did not exhibit typical development patterns, we seeked professional advice and the Autism word was thrown about a lot. 

With the word Autism came the term Autistic Spectrum Disorder, the question in the early years was always which end of the spectrum they each would be on.  The upper end didn’t seem too bad and could even result in an interesting individual who could be independent.   It turned out that we had one at the upper end and one at the lower end of the spectrum.  The strange thing is that we thought Ben, who was not hyperactive and ambidextrous like his sister, would actually be the milder one.  We attributed his “stubbornness” and lack of speech to being a boy and having speech delay, thinking that he would snap out of it sometime soon. 

We went to many therapists and met many families there, some of these families would later migrate to western countries for better disability services.  One of the therapists did warn us that if we ever wanted to move, the best time was “now” when Alyssa and Ben, then aged 5 and 2 years, could escape detection.  Some countries such as Australia, would approve a Permanent Residency application pending medical reports only to reject it later when one of the children showed a disability.   At that time we did not consider migration seriously, my husband and I already had our adventure when we worked overseas and preferred the comfort of Malaysia.  Besides with Montessori kindergartens and private therapists, we were coping.

Come primary school, both went to mainstream schools with the help of a shadow aide.  While Alyssa  could manage without a shadow within a couple of years, it soon became evident that Ben was falling way behind his peers.  Mainstream was not within his reach and I had to find an alternative.  One option was to arrange an appropriate education privately at home, another was to put him in a special school.  I visited schools locally, I also visited schools overseas to gauge what was supposed to be the “ideal”.  I found that the disparity between schools in Malaysia and those overseas was huge.  I also found that it would be very difficult for me to achieve special education privately at home.

While mainstream schooling prepares a child for a professional/academic career and assumes that in the event of failure, the child would fall back on a vocational job; special education prepares a child for vocational work and in the event of failure, the child would fall back on independent living in an adult home facility.  In special schools overseas I saw simulated factory lines, hotel rooms, cafes, grocery stores, cleaning workshops and kitchens.  For those who could manage, it was serious skill training. For example, what kind of cleaning solvent is used for oil floor stains as opposed to coloured dye stains.  If they excelled, they could be further trained in a vocational tertiary college for special needs or do a mainstream vocational skill course.  In which case, having gone through a vocational secondary school, the special needs students would have a “one-up” on their typical peers.  For the less-abled it was exposure to working in a factory line with more emphasis on daily living skills and leisure pursuits.

To my amazement, schools “overseas”, did not have to mean Australia, New Zealand, UK or US, they were just across the border in Singapore and what’s even more amazing is that the good ones are government funded.  Singapore citizens and PRs pay what we would consider a nominal fee, the higher fees being around SGD150 per month for St Andrew’s, a somewhat ABA based school  for primary and secondary aged children with Autism with a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:4.  I try not to be superficial but the school building is state-of-the-art!

I must say I discovered Singapore by accident (after visiting a couple of western countries).  A friend whose husband had been transferred to Singapore asked me to accompany her to look at schools, I agreed but was later disappointed that she wanted to see a government funded school called MINDS (Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore). After visiting Malaysian government special schools, I didn’t think those across the border would be much better.  So I lined up visits to 3 private special schools there to make our trip worthwhile.  What I saw in MINDS was a pleasant surprise, a stated teacher-to-student ratio of 1:10 but most classes had 1:6.  Each MINDS school (there were branches around the country) had an in-house psychologist, occupational therapist and speech therapist. 

I made three more trips and saw five more government funded schools, sheltered workshops, social enterprises and found that there was even an employment agency for the disabled called Bizlink while MINDS was on a pilot project to set up her own employment agency specifically for the intellectually challenged.  I felt like the whole burden of providing a suitable environment for Ben would be lifted if we were in Singapore, so we moved.

With an almost identical culture and being a short journey away from grandparents and cousins, it offered the best of both worlds.  It’s still early on in our new home, perhaps later I may find holes in this perfect tapestry I’ve found but right now it sure seems like heaven on earth.

 

Written by,

Li-Ling