Our best long term investment

Let me do something different today. Instead of a usual money investment topic, l’d like to do some father’s talking today as this is a special weekend for us, our beloved son’s birthday! And coincidentally the Father's day as well!! 

My wife and I are not kind of parents having extremely high expectations for our kids, wishing them accomplishing something that must have some historical impact or something like this. For us, our expectation is very low; we just hope our son can grow up happily and can do what he loves to do and at the same time can live comfortably without the need to worry about his financial future. If he happens to be able to achieve something more impactful, that will be great but it is definitely not what we are looking for. This is how we have tried to do in raising our beloved son in the past 2 decades. So today, I’m just taking the opportunity, when he reached his next important life milestone, to share some of our happy experience. While every child is different and unique and there is no such thing as a standard template for raising a child, I do find useful by exchanging some experiences with friends as we all can learn something from each other. This is the whole purpose of this writing. It is nothing to do with stock investment but for me it is the most important long term investment for parents.

Everyone with the parenting experience certainly knows how challenge to raise a child! There are so many challenges that I cannot cover all in just one blog, but I think three challenges are among the most important ones all parents must handle very carefully.

The Role of Child. This I think is often a misunderstood and underestimated aspect in raising a child in terms of its importance. For most parents, especially among Chinese parents, parents must have the absolute authority and power to order and children must obey to follow. I think it is very detrimental actually, although may not be so obvious, to kids’ personality development. My wife and I have got the consensus since day one that we must treat our son as a friend, not a child. So we have always talked to him like a friend since he was very young by listening to his needs and making suggestions instead of ordering if we would like him to do something we wanted. We also shared our challenges and difficulties we were facing with him so that he really got the sense that he was our friend, the best friend for us! Of course there are many nuances into it but the key is that we truly acted like friends to him. The result? He has been so close to us all the times, so much so that we didn’t experience any teenage challenges with him as he just treated us as friends and naturally shared everything with us without hesitance whenever he got frustrated or had problems. Even in his late 20s nowadays, he is still so close to us by hanging on the phone with us several hours during the weekend whenever possible. It is just so natural for him to want to talk to us regardless if there are any specific topics for discussion. What a great and happy lifelong achievement we have made!! We feel sorry to hear many stories of friends that their kids are almost like suddenly changing to a totally different person when they get into their teenage. One mother friend complained why their angel like daughter suddenly became a monster. Another was questioning why their son stopped talking to them and would only lock himself in his room at home. My wife’s colleague said that their college daughter never called them unless asking for money...... Well, it is really not uncommon to see such sad changes during the kids’ teenage period. The last thing any parents want to face is to try to figure out what their kids are thinking, what they are doing or even worse where they are. I don’t know if there is a panacea but at least for our experience, making your precious kids as your friends is likely an effective way to overcome the challenges. We have tried and it has worked perfectly for us but importantly, it is not just a simple saying but an daily act that you need to make your kid feel and trust you as friends!   

Shaping up of Personality. As I said, each child is unique and different and there is no absolute best personality one can acquire. It is just a given that we all have some strengths in our personality and some weakness. Same for each child. So it could be a daunting task for parents to help their kids to overcome some obvious weakness in personality. For example, our son has always been a very nice and easy going boy. But we noticed from very early on that he was a bit shy and afraid of speaking in front of crowd. He was always among the last ones to speak in a group. As we all know, when something is naturally born with, it is very difficult to change. We have tried many different ways to encourage him to overcome this and one thing we experimented I think was very effective but required a lot of time and effort on our part. Each weekend, we made a setup mimicking a public Q&A, asking him to stand up to answer our questions impromptu and we even videotaped it. After he got used to it with months of practicing, we took every opportunity to ask our friends to join the rehearsal. We noticed significant improvement in his self confidence over time in public speaking.  Then we encouraged him to join the public speaking club at school and attended real life competitions whenever there was an opportunity. He ended up winning the national championship for the Canadian High School Bilingual Debating. This has indeed become his lifelong gift as he told us that making a public speech is a piece of cake for him now, the best music to our ears of course!

The last but not least, the Career Future. Needless to say, making a decision on what to do in life is by no means easy and simple. As physicians by training for both of us, we naturally first thought about the medical career for our son but he strongly objected it. He was even not much interested in science in general. So what he liked and wanted to do? He is very talented in language and therefore can speak 6 languages fluently. Just a side note, while he has never formally leant Chinese in any school (even weekend school), you probably would think he grew up in China if you simply talked to him verbally. And he knows much more Chinese history than us (a shameful feeling for me honestly).  Actually his Chinese writing is not so bad in my opinion. Here is one simple note he wrote to me lately: “ 爸，我们最近在先期认证方面政策好像有变化，等我老板回来后我和他确认一下。Love”. Does this look like from someone who has never formally learnt Chinese?  But he can easily unmask his true weakness ( 露出马脚) when he says or writes something like: 我会在我的心脏里记住你的。Anyway, he is more interested in liberal science, especially history or political science. After knowing his career interest and tendency, we knew we had some work to do to guide him towards something more practical. Of course, as a friend, we didn’t want to just force him to listen to us but wanted him to make a more rational choice for his future career. Fortunately I had already fallen in love with finance and therefore started to engage him more into the financial topics and discussions. It was great to see him becoming more and more interested in economics and ended up in studying economics and business (double majors) at the Haas School of UC Berkley. By the way, one thing we have been trying to influence him all the years is about the personal finance. We love our son but we never spoil him. In order to make him understand the real life difficulty in making money, we got a job for him when he was only 10 years old to deliver newspapers. It was really a tough job by any means as he had to get up around 6 AM each weekend, even during the winter that was often -10 or -20 C, to finish his job. He continued this job for quite a few years as the first taste of bread earning challenges with his tenacity and persistence. All his earnings have then been invested via my favorite strategy, dividend reinvestment. We have kept advising him and he has now well understood the importance of financial freedom, which has become his personal goal, aiming to realize by 40s. He often tells us that his real dream job is to become a historian and to teach or write history related stories. But he understands that he has to make efforts to get himself financially free first and then do what he really enjoys and dreams about. We are thrilled to see him well on his way to realize his ultimate goal with happiness and enjoyment.   

So what’s the milestone I have alluded to? Well, after several years working in the top bond company, Pimco and now JP Morgan, he is ready to take a shot for the next level. Have you heard  INSEAD? I bet most of friends have never heard about it, including myself till my son told me about it. This is actually one of the global leading MBA programs, ranked at the top, even above Harvard or Wharton school by Financial Times (see here). What is even more attractive is that it has a one-year MBA program to go instead of typically at least two years. I was very surprised but happy to find about it and hopefully this is good information for those who are also thinking something in this nature for their kids. Armed with great language skills with deep knowledge on history and political affairs, he is really very internationally oriented and loves to go beyond the US. So Insead is his natural choice when he wants to do his MBA. He has now been enrolled in the program for next year. I’m really happy for what he has done in all the years up to now and I’m more happy to see he is able to do what he likes to do in his life. Nothing is more important for us as parents.  Selfishly I have a dream. I dream to have a family business in finance that I can use my son’s credentials, experience and network to jump start it. Maybe I’m seeing more than just the light at the end of the tunnel now?   

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SON!