“To be honest, I don’t take care of him too much. I want to him to be more independent. I do advise him, and if he listens, that’s good. But if he doesn’t, that’s also okay. We communicate a lot. We share our ideas, our opinions of what we should do and what we should not do. He is 13. I suspected that he wouldn’t listen as much as before, but it seems like he has been standing with me most of the time.
I think my parents put too much attention on me. I didn’t feel comfortable. So, I tried to avoid this with my son. Since he was very very young, I told my wife and his grandparents not to intervene in his life too much. To just give him advice, and if he doesn’t want to listen, then just let him be. That’s what I thought, and it looks like he’s been doing okay.
A year ago, his school asked him to do a personality test, and it turns out he’s called a logician. It is the second rarest personality. I forgot how to say this word in English, but in Chinese, it’s called neixiang. These people don’t want to spend much time with a lot of people. They like to stay by themselves. But he’s very talkative. He doesn’t have any problems with his friends. He’s like me. I’m very talkative, but I am very, very neixiang. I didn’t realize this until a few years ago. A psychologist that told me, you’re very introverted — that’s the word. I was quite surprised. I never thought of myself as introverted. Nobody told me this before, but it turns out that my son is quite like me. I can feel uncomfortable when I am around many people. I find that I am pretty comfortable sitting in my workshop doing all kinds of things I like. I sit in the woods, think about things, develop some ideas, and make it a real product. And I feel like my son has a very similar personality as me.
I hope that he can be creative. I wish I knew this when I was a kid. I like to invent things and find factories to make products for me. If I realized this passion when I was young, I would have started my business a lot earlier. My life would have been much easier. I wish I had more time to develop more things. So, I would like him to start earlier, but it also depends on what he wants to do.
I’m not too worried about him. But I’m little bit of worried about mental health problems, like depression. I’ve seen too many people suffer from these things and it is terrible. Some of them are my close friends. It’s a terrible thing. You’ll see a person who is strong, who is young. But they can’t work. Their mental state has crashed.
So, I want my son to take good care of himself. I don’t know what’s going to happen in his life, but I want him to be strong and to be able to survive any kind of environment. And live well. And help others. I hope he can learn as much as possible from his father.” – Brian Tian, Lebanon, NH
