Children!

    I went to shopping mall and my host parent's house during the thanksgiving break. In these two different environments, I had observed my host parent's grandson and the children in the mall and I was really surprised on the way how parents and children behave in the United States. They teach and protect their children in a different way compared to parents in Malaysia.
    As what I saw, children in the United States are given more freedom and are trained to be independent. Parents are likely to allow their children to walk by their own and they will observe their children to make sure their safety. However, Malaysian parents are totally different in the way of protecting their children. Most of the Malaysian parents will hold their children's hand or hug them tightly to make sure they are safe from any harm. These children do not have freedom to walk to anywhere as they desire, they will just follow their parents blindly.
    Next, American parents will never slap or scold their children loudly unless they really did something really horrible and irritated their parent. I observed that American parents used to teach their children in a polite manner for example whenever a children did something wrong, the parent will just talk to them and tell them not to make the same mistake again. Surprisingly, their children were obedient and listened to their parents. In Malaysia, children usually will not listen to their parent if their parent treated them the same way as the Americans teach their children. In spite of having a nice conversation and teach them how to behave, they would likely prefer punish and reward method whereby children will only listen to their parent after they were being canned in doing something wrong.
    In my opinion, I personally think that American culture in teaching children is better compared to Malaysian even though children with different behavior should be treated differently.