I became a psychologist because I wanted to understand children.
I became the psychologist I am because children, families and communities taught me how much understanding matters.
For the past five years, I worked at Stamford American International School in Singapore. I started there as a counsellor and later moved into a school psychologist role. My time at Stamford became fundemental to my understanding of what it really means to support a child.
Not just in an assessment room. Not just through a diagnosis. But in the middle of ordinary life. In the everyday moments when a child is trying very hard to hold it together, and in the moments when they cannot.
Children taught me to look beneath the behaviour
One of the most important things I learned was this: Children want to do well. That does not mean they always can. A child who is dysregulated may not yet have the capacity to manage what is being asked of them. A child who refuses may be overwhelmed. A child who avoids may be afraid of failing. A child who appears careless may be struggling with executive functioning. A child who is angry may be communicating something they do not yet have the words to say.
Behaviour matters. But behaviour is also information. The longer I worked with children, the less interested I became in asking only: How do we stop this behaviour? And the more interested I became in asking: What is this child trying to tell us?
I learned that children do not grow alone
School psychology taught me something I knew in theory, but experienced the full power of, supporting a child means supporting the adults around them too. A psychologist can spend an hour with a child. Their teachers and parents live the other twenty-three.
The most meaningful changes I saw were rarely because one person had found the perfect intervention. They happened because people worked together. A teacher adjusted an expectation. A parent understood a behaviour differently. A counsellor became a safe person. A learning-support teacher found the right scaffold. A child learned how to ask for help. Having all these people, who stayed curious, and kept believing that the child could grow. Over time, the child began believing it too.
That is why I have come to think of psychological work less as fixing a problem and more as building the conditions in which a child can feel safe enough to develop.
My work is personal
I grew up close to disability and difference. Looking back, a lot of my struggles was because I too have ADHD. There were things about myself that I had spent years understanding as personal failings that suddenly made more sense. Not excuses, but explanations. That distinction is one I now think about often when I work with children. Because the stories adults tell about a child eventually become the stories children tell about themselves. Being understood does not remove difficulty. But it can change the way a child walks through it.
Stamford shaped the psychologist I became
Stamford gave me something I did not realise I needed until I experienced it: the feeling of being understood and accepted as I was. As a professional. As a colleague. As a friend.
That experience stayed with me because it mirrored something I was also learning about children that being known changes the way we grow and show up.
Stamford had a strong culture of care, inclusion and belonging, and I was part of a team that worked hard to make students feel accepted rather than simply managed. We were constantly encouraged to think about the cultures, identities and experiences children brought with them, and how those shaped the way they learned, related and moved through school. Growing up in Singapore, I had always known that culture influenced the way families parent, communicate, seek help and understand difference. But my years at Stamford made that belief much more explicit in my work.
It solidified something I now carry into everything I do as a psychologist, you cannot understand a child without understanding the context and culture they are growing up in. And you cannot support a family well if you leave culture outside the room. That belief sits alongside a few others that have become central to the way I think and work.
I do not think children are problems to be solved.
I believe children need adults who are curious about them.
I believe parents deserve explanations they can actually understand.
I believe professional knowledge should be useful outside professional rooms.
And I believe that when children feel safe, seen and understood, we often discover that they are capable of far more than their difficulties first suggested.
That is the perspective I now carry into assessment rooms, therapy sessions, conversations with schools, and now, into Kithe.
