by Rebekah Krushnisky / © 2025, ORTV.
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Kimberly Chen wears many hats. She is a water sports athlete, a certified fitness coach, an entrepreneur in the beauty industry, a faith-driven speaker and a mother of two. She has had an atypical journey as a competitive athlete. Chen started wakesurfing at 35 years old but won a silver medal just five years later in the Masters Women division at the WWA Masters Wakesurf Championships in 2019. She would go on to win countless more medals and become world champion in her division in 2022.
Growing up in a conservative family that valued education, Chen enjoyed dancing as a young girl but stopped dancing when her mother told her it had no career potential. To fulfill her parents’ expectations and succeed in an Asian education system that prized academic achievements above all, she put all her effort into getting good grades and obtaining a lucrative job. At university, she studied civil engineering, a major she chose not out of enjoyment, but one that offered a promising career at a time when Taiwan was rapidly developing and building many large-scale infrastructure projects.
Becoming a parent
Years later, when Chen became a parent, she and her Canadian-born husband, Thomas, made a conscious decision to embrace a different parenting approach. They wanted to raise happy, confident children whose self-worth was not completely tied to grades or academic achievements. Today, their two children, 18-year-old Jocelyn, a college freshman, and 14-year-old Brayden, are well-rounded individuals and have found the areas in which they truly shine.
How does a champion prepare her children for success in life? Here are four parenting tips from Chen.
To instill independence, Chen gave her children choices from a young age. When Jocelyn was in elementary school, she wanted to do an English camp abroad one summer. Chen told her that if she wanted to go to the camp, she would need to pass the mandatory language requirement exam. If she passed, she could go. If she didn’t pass, she would spend the summer studying Hokkien with grandpa instead. Jocelyn worked hard, passed the exam and went to summer camp abroad.
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