Nicholas Yap
Chief operating officer
ComfortDelGro Cabcharge Pty Ltd

THEY say parents in Singapore are 'kiasu'. They obviously haven't met the Australians. These are parents who start 'queuing' their kids for primary school slots even before they are born!

Yes you heard me. Before they are born.

So you can imagine the kind of stress my wife, Karen, and I are under now that our daughter is three years old - and still without a confirmed place in primary school.

Every morning over breakfast, we pore through guide books, brochures and listings for the best primary school for our little one. We've even done up an excel sheet with the pros and cons all listed. Then there's an annex which deals with the various factors we have to consider when deciding where our little girl will spend the most formative years of her life.

Do we splurge on a private school for her - one that offers the International Baccalaureate, or do we enrol her in a more affordable Government school? Do we put her in a school with more Asians so that she will feel more comfortable, or a local school where she can mingle with the local Australians? Do we need to move to a suburb where there are better schools or stay put and just find the best one in our neighbourhood?

Mind-boggling questions all - quite similar I suspect to what many of my friends back home in Singapore are facing. The difference, I guess, is that things are a lot more alien to us here than in Singapore, where Karen and I grew up.

Just the other day, we heard about how a poor choice of school can ruin the child's entire life. One kid joined a new school midway through his first year because his father got a new job posting. Within three months, he had expanded his vocabulary with a wide array of swear words and by the end of the year, he started playing truant.

Talk about parental stress!

In fact, University of Sydney researchers investigating the growing pressure on parents to choose the right school for their children have proposed that middle class families can be divided into seven different groupings.

The groups - the old middle class, the new middle class, the Catholic middle class, the cosmopolitan middle class, the first generation middle class, the self-made middle class and the marginal middle class - all had different attitudes to schooling but were almost all united by a sense of anxiety about schooling, and the need to protect their children from the 'wrong' school.

I'm not sure which category we fall into but I know one thing's for sure: We're definitely anxious and definitely don't want to make a wrong decision.

If you are looking for a school for your kid, I wish you the best of luck. I know for sure we will need it.

This article was first published in The Business Times.