I cry easily, mostly when pain is inflicted on my daughters in the course of some medical procedure such as vaccination and blood withdrawal.

Yet I was surprised at the tears that welled up in my eyes when I read a newspaper account of the last moments between a dying son and his mother.

According to The New Paper report, Mr Loh Ying Jie, who fell into a coma after a jet ski accident in Phuket, managed to hang on to life until his mother arrived at the hospital and held his hand.

'That was when the 20-year-old breathed his last. Mrs Loh crumpled to the floor in tears,' observed the reporter.

No matter how many times I read those sentences, I still feel a swell of emotion crawling over my skin. The heart squeezes a little and the eyes tingle with the hint of moisture.

I cannot be sure if I used to feel this way about tragedies that befall parents before my becoming a father, before the lives of two little girls were placed in my hands to do as I deem fit, before the responsibility made me a worrywart and a wuss.

All I know now is I avoid as much as possible all stories about bad things happening to little ones. Ditto my wife.

Horror news reports about maids' abuse of babies and toddlers, the one-year-old who would have died if the heroic maid had not sacrificed herself to save her, and especially the countless heartbreaking accounts of children battling terminal illnesses.

One of the worst incidents my wife and I heard ambushed us at a party. A friend told us that her relatives' toddler was kidnapped in Hong Kong Disneyland. I almost broke into a cold sweat.

I think I walked away pretty quickly. It was all I could do to stop myself from covering my ears and singing at the top of my voice.

You could say I am behaving like the ostrich which sticks its head in the sand and you would be right. The plan is to bury myself in blissful ignorance that bad things happen, at least until both my daughters, Faith and Sarah, are old enough that I wouldn't feel such unspeakable agony.

The problem is, how old is old enough?

I used to think that once they reach schooling age, it'd be easier to handle untoward news, since they'd no longer be defenceless, innocent, trusting little tots with really tiny hands and feet and everything else that are so crushable in so many ways.

When Faith was not two weeks old, she had vials of blood syringed from her to test for jaundice. I burst into tears.

Over the years, I have not toughened up, just changed my strategy of dealing with such situations. When the nurse began wringing Sarah's feet for blood for another kind of test, I just left my wife to hold her. Sarah, born smaller than the average baby at 2.45kg, was barely one week old at the time. Her feet were smaller than pieces of fried chicken I have eaten effortlessly.

But the fact is, it never gets easier for parents. As Courteney Cox's character in the television series Cougar Town says: 'That's all that parenting really is: trying to keep your kids from dying. When they're babies, it's swimming pools. When they're 50, it's heart attacks and Russian prostitutes.'

Instead of the worries and heartaches lessening, I think the pain of an unfortunate event happening to a child is multiplied with every year, every month, every day that a parent spends loving and caring for him.

Which means, or so I believe, parents who take little part in the raising of their children grieve less. In any case, they have less right to anguish.

If you don't feed your children, don't run after them in the park, don't wake up in the middle of the night to take their temperature when they are ill, don't bathe them, don't draw indecipherable doodles with them, don't read with or to them - leaving to your domestic helpers these tasks - what right have you to love and sorrow?

I used to wonder why human babies are not born immediately with the ability to walk and carry themselves independently like many offspring of animals can.

Foolish non-scientist that I am, I think our children's utter dependence on us in the first few years of their lives is a gift, not a chore (though it often feels that way).

The love that you take is equal to the love that you make, is equal to the grief the pulverises your heart into smithereens when the object of that love is suffering or gone.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.