The pre-school was featured on the front page of The Straits Times last Tuesday, in a report about parents queuing overnight to get their kids a spot on the kindergarten’s wait list for 2013.

But for my parents, enrolling me in Nanyang Kindergarten wasn’t enough.

Every day at 11am, as my classmates headed home or raced off to the playground, I followed my maid Mary to another kindergarten across the street. This second kindergarten was a PAP Community Foundation (PCF) kindergarten, formerly located at Blk 6, Farrer Road. Unlike Nanyang Kindergarten, a private kindergarten with the land area of a bungalow, the PCF kindergarten was located at a HDB void deck.

My parents sent me to two kindergartens because they felt I would benefit more that way than spending the afternoon at home. They wanted to introduce me to a world outside of my “bubble”, by instilling in me at a young age that there was more to life than fancy toys and luxurious holidays.

It had nothing to do with the quality of teaching at Nanyang Kindergarten. My parents just felt that something was missing.

And now looking back, I think they were right.

Although located only blocks apart, each kindergarten provided me with very different experiences. The class size at Nanyang Kindergarten was a lot smaller, and we were not required to wear uniforms. I also vaguely remember the teachers at PCF kindergarten being more stern. The teachers at Nanyang kindergarten were less inclined to scold us. When we did something wrong, they always spoke to us very gently. For me, it was as if the PCF kindergarten was the strict parent, and Nanyang Kindergarten was the nice one.

At the latter, the curriculum also seemed less rigid, and song and dance played an equal role to the alphabet and numbers. For our end-of-year graduation ceremony, for example, I was asked to learn the xylophone, which was definitely more enjoyable than memorising multiplication tables.

But going to the PCF kindergarten taught me a very important lesson: Always keep yourself grounded.

There, my classmates were kids who walked to school, whose family didn’t employ maids, and who had to help out with household chores. It made me more appreciative, and I started wanting to do things on my own, like carry my own water bottle.

Ultimately, I believe it is not the school that we go to that makes us who we are, but the home we’ve been nurtured in.

Paying thousands of dollars or queuing up overnight to attend what one perceives to be a better kindergarten may not actually give us a headstart in life.

Twenty years later, I have friends who attended private and public kindergartens - but I don’t feel I’m any different from them.