Why I Let My Girls Watch Netflix

I was in the kitchen last Sunday when I heard my daughters in the next room, deep in some roleplay game they had invented. One of them was doing a voice. An American voice, reasonably convincing, the kind you hear from cartoon characters on kids’ shows. She had no idea I was listening.

I stood there for a moment, genuinely unsure whether to laugh or feel like something was actually working.

Here is the thing about raising kids in Singapore. You cannot opt out of Singlish. It is in the air, it is in the school, it is in the hawker centre and the void deck and every conversation your kids will have with their friends from age four onwards. I can spend twenty minutes at the dinner table reminding my girls to speak properly and they will walk into school the next morning and undo all of it in the first ten minutes of recess. Peer influence does not just compete with parental reminders. It wins, almost every time.

I am not saying this is bad. Singlish is part of who we are here and I am not trying to raise kids who are embarrassed about being Singaporean. That is not the goal.

The goal is range.

I work in a multinational company. I travel for work. I have sat in enough rooms, across enough meetings and presentations, to know that how you speak shapes how you are perceived, fairly or not. A heavy local accent and grammar gaps are not career-ending, but they do create a ceiling in certain contexts, and I have seen it close on people who were otherwise very capable.

I want my daughters to be able to switch. To speak one way with their school friends and another way in a boardroom or on a stage. Code-switching is a skill, and like most skills, the window to build it most naturally is when you are young.

The problem is that Singapore makes this hard precisely because English is everywhere. You cannot create a clean input environment here the way you can elsewhere.

My wife’s nieces grew up in Indonesia. They learnt English at an enrichment centre with teachers who had international accents. They watched American shows. That was essentially the only English they were ever exposed to because English is not the street language there. Nobody speaks it casually at the market or with the neighbours. So the input was small in volume but consistent in quality.

The output, as they grew older, is a clean and natural-sounding accent. Not put-on. Just what happened when the only English they absorbed was well-produced.

Singapore is the harder version of this problem. The input is everywhere and most of it is Singlish. You cannot eliminate the noise. You can only try to add enough quality signal to compete with it.

That is why I let my girls watch Netflix.

Specifically, we allow about an hour a day, mostly American-produced kids’ shows. Paw Patrol for a long stretch when they were younger. Gabby’s Dollhouse after that. I am not particularly attached to these titles but they share something useful, proper American English, clean sentence structures, characters who speak in full grammatical sentences at a pace young kids can absorb.

We stay away from YouTube. The reason is less about content and more about format. YouTube is algorithm-driven and fragmented. The language exposure is inconsistent, the production quality varies wildly, and the viewing tends to be passive channel-flipping rather than sustained narrative. Netflix at least gives you a story with a beginning and end, dialogue that repeats across episodes, patterns a young brain can start to internalise.

I should be honest about what our enforcement actually looked like.

Before my girls could read independently, there were plenty of times at a restaurant or sitting through Sunday mass when we gave up and just handed them a phone. They were making noise, other people were giving us looks, and the path of least resistance was a screen. We took it.

I am not holding any of this up as a model. It is just what actually happened.

The shift came when they became proper independent readers. Once a book was a genuine option for them, one they could pick up and disappear into on their own, the phone handover stopped naturally. Reading replaced it. And books, unlike YouTube, gave us some control over what was going into their heads.

Do I know if any of this is working? Not fully.

What I can observe: at their public speaking classes, they sound noticeably different from how they speak at home with their friends. When they read out loud, the accent sharpens. And then there is that Sunday kitchen moment, my daughter slipping into an American voice mid-game, not performing it for anyone, just playing.

Maybe it is compounding quietly in the background. Maybe by the time it matters, when they are older and standing in rooms where the stakes are real, they will be able to reach for that register and find it there.

I am still watching to find out.