“CPL (not her real name) says I shouldn’t wear my jacket in class, otherwise she won’t give me a jelly / won’t be my friend..”

“Uhh.. Okay. Why do you have to listen to her??”

“Aishah (her real name!) has a pink camera; I want a pink camera too..”

At this stage I was wondering why her school mate was bringing her camera to school….. “You don’t need a new camera; the one Daddee gave you is a real camera- it can even take moving pictures too..” It can- it takes short video clips.

[ I have since upgraded to a better camera, you see, and Caitlin does seem to handle this hand-me-down quite well. She's taken some shots that aren't too bad. It's funny how adults, whom wouldn't be caught dead pulling faces, would do so in the face of a toddler with a real camera- I mean, they know it's a real camera which can snap real photos! ]

“I waaaannnt. It has a Barbie doll inside too….”

Anyway. It began to sound to me that she was feeling defeated by her schoolmates- the start of peer pressure; at only (nearly) 4 years old!

I don’t know if I did the right thing, when I offered this to her:

“But your friends don’t have the pink sunglasses that you are wearing now, and some more (moreover), it’s from Australia… do they?”

[ In our last visit to Sydney I had bought her a AUD20-ish kids sunglasses at the airport- An Anti Cancer Society certified one. She asks for them when she sees I am wearing mine in the car. ]

Photo taken during the last trip to Genting, on the merry-go-around as she calls it

I was about to go further and say that it shields her eyes from the UV rays, that her friends probably only have those cheap ones from the night markets….. But thought to leave that till when she comes to me with her physics homework many years from now…

I could tell in my rear view mirror that it made her feel better, somewhat.

But somehow I feel I have made an upbringing / parenting faux pas: That I have cultivated the one-up-manship… The “I’m better than you” mentality…

Should I have just left it at “Uhhh….okay…” ?