The Art And Science Of Parenting

Are you an ‘arts’ or a ‘science’ person? Our columnist, Dora Yip, suggests that the divide between arts and sciences may not be so distinct.

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AsianScientist (Nov. 13, 2015) – One question I get asked a lot throughout my parenting journey is whether my husband or I are “science-types”.

This usually happens at one of my son’s many science-related activities, like his weekly Dunedin Space Program meeting. It’s held in a small observatory which sits high on the hills of Dunedin, overlooking the city from the edge of a rugby field—somewhat symbolically in a country where science cultivates on the edge of the limelight dominated by sports.

I was picking my way back across the muddy rugby field in the evening twilight after dropping my son off, when another parent strolled alongside me.

“Is Jordan enjoying Friday nights at the observatory?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s completely his sort of thing,” I replied.

“Hey, are you a scientist? Or his dad?”

“Nope, we’re both arts grads who’ve never dissected a thing in our lives!”



A product of streaming (and I don’t mean Spotify)

Raised in 1980s and 1990s Singapore, I’m the product of academic streaming, the original Hogwarts sorting hat that determined whether a person’s inner soul should be devoted to the nation’s labs or libraries. So at the wise old age of nine, I set my eyes on the humanities path. At 15, when I had to choose my ‘O’ Level subject combinations, I went for a safe mix of arts and science subjects, but knew better than to opt for the prized ‘triple science’ combo of Biology-Physics-Chemistry that the very top students gravitated towards.

For my ‘A’ levels, I discarded the sciences altogether and became a pure “Humanities Person”, which set me up to eventually graduate from university with an honors degree in English Literature. It all seemed to make sense to my teenage self at the time. Plus, I got to do my thesis on Australian film, which was unbelievably fun.

A few years later, I married a man who loves reading as much as me. He was the History to my Geography, and actually enjoyed watching subtitled foreign films. Our combined vocabulary makes a pretty kick-ass Scrabble team, yet together, we don’t have enough DIY skills to survive past day one of a zombie apocalypse.

So I often ask myself, how did two Arts-types people bring about a kid who seems hard-wired to live in lab coat?

Obviously I’m not a scientist so shall not attempt to answer that.

Instead, I’d like to reframe the conversation I’m having with myself.


Who says the arts and sciences can’t occupy the same petri dish?

Educationally speaking, I suppose I’ve long had the assumptions instilled in me that arts and sciences are two very different beasts, requiring different skill sets and approaches.

But of late, it’s really hit home that the arts-science divide is a false dichotomy.

It started, like many things in my household, with a random pre-bedtime conversation with my seven-year-old.

“What’s your favorite fungi, mummy?”

“Err, giant puffball. How about yours?”

That was the moment.

As he rattled off his favorite mushrooms (gleaned from a recently read called A Mushroom Picker’s Guide to British Mushrooms or something similar), I heard poetry.

Amethyst Deceiver.

Destroying Angel.

Velvet Earthstar.

Chicken of the Woods.

And the one that made me giggle, immediately conjuring up images of Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree:

Sticky Bun Bolete.

It was the most surreal literary mycological experience I’ve ever had.


From Poetry to Fictional Science

Jordan writes a weekly story as part of his language lessons at school. One Friday, he brought home his book of essays and proudly showed them to me. What struck me was how seamlessly he blended science and fiction together. Just have a read of one of his more action packed stories, about an epic dinosaur battle that took place one prehistoric afternoon:

One stormy day there was a dinosaur. His name was Spino. He was the biggest predator ever. Everyone was scared of him.

T-Rex said, we have to defeat Spino. But little did they know there was a whole pack of Spinosauruses. The Spinosauruses were planning a trick!

When T-Rex was drinking, Spino swam to him, then… he bit the T-Rex’s neck! T-Rex ran away.

The next day they were planning for battle. At 3 pm they were battling. The Spinosauruses were bigger than T-Rex! The Spinosauruses bit the T-Rex. T-Rex bit Spinosaurus. The Spinosauruses won. The T-Rexes never came back. The end.

He seemed to have instinctively unearthed the drama behind the fossils.

While on the topic of science fiction, a recent freakish coincidence confirmed once and for all that the Arts vs Science debate is void. Truth is people, they are both circles in the larger venn diagram titled “IMAGINATION.”

As regular readers of this column will know, my son Jordan is obsessed with fungi, an obsession sparked by the BBC documentary Planet Earth. In fact, rather than any bureaucratic streaming, it took just one ten-minute segment of this sweeping documentary to set him on his own path less traveled: an episode about jungles featuring a killer cordycep that turned ants into zombies!

Naturally, I was impressed by this rather creepy phenomenon. But never did I think that the next time I encountered it would be in a contemporary fiction book loaned to me by a fellow book nerd. For what formed the entire basis of this unputdownable book—“The Girl With All the Gifts”—was the exact same monster cordycep! And what’s more, the book will soon be turned into a movie starring the doyenne of film herself, Glenn Close. And if this is not evidence enough that science inspires art then I raise my feelers in despair.

So from now on, if someone asks me the perennial question, I’ll just substitute being ‘science-types’ for being ‘sci-curious’ and I think I’ll have my answer.

Because, after all, aren’t we all?


This article is from a monthly column called Mushroom Mum. Click here to see the other articles in this series.

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Source: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Denise Chan/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Dora Yip lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, and is mom to six-year-old Jordan and two-year-old Jonah.

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