Cost of Childlessness in Singapore: The Hidden National Bill

Local publication Jom recently ran a well-written essay about splitting the dinner bill. A group sits down for zi char, some order carefully, but then someone adds the crab and beer, and at the end, nobody says anything as the bill is divided evenly because nobody wants to look calculative. The unfairness disappears into that useful Singaporean phrase, “aiyah, never mind lah”.

The essay stayed with me because it described more than dinner. It showed how easily politeness can conceal a moral imbalance when one person bears costs from which others benefit.

Our liberal friends understand the moral calculus under the dinner-table problem. They know that a person’s “personal choice” (for crab in this case), does not make communal consequences disappear. Yet many would hesitate to apply the same logic when the table expands into a nation and the costly contribution is raising children.

Children are persons, not dishes ordered for common consumption. But one household still spends years privately raising a child who eventually enters a society that publicly demands his labour, tax contributions, caregiving and national service.

We are all tired of hearing it by now: Singapore’s resident fertility rate fell to 0.87 in 2025. But helpfully, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong supplied the abstract arithmetic with a useful, albeit bleak scenario: if that rate persists, every 100 residents today would yield only 44 children and 19 grandchildren.

By my son’s working years, that will mean fewer peers and more dependants for each young working adult to support.

Marriage and Parenthood are Receding

According to MSF’s 2026 Family Trends Report, Singapore registered 6.2 per cent fewer marriages in 2025 than in 2024, with the steepest falls among people aged 25 to 34.

• The age of first-time motherhood continued to slip; the median first-time mothers rose to 32.1 in 2025, up from 30.5 a decade earlier — almost two years in an already dangerously squeezed fertility window.
• Birth rates among women aged 25 to 29 have fallen almost by half since 2015;
• and among those aged 30 to 34, they have fallen by nearly 30 per cent.

For older women, what begins as delay in service of career often becomes permanent: many couples who intend to have children later find that “later” never arrives. The data shows that even among ever-married women aged 40 to 49, the share with no children rose from 11.6 per cent in 2015 to 16.1 per cent in 2025.

The modern promise that one can always have children later is, as predicted, beginning to fray. Technologies like IVF and egg freezing, often marketed as reliable safety nets, cannot fully overcome biological limits. As explored in our earlier pieces on elective egg freezing and children’s rights and its policy implications in “A Policy Ovary Action”, what is framed as postponement can quietly become permanent childlessness.

Taken together, the pattern is clear. Fewer people are marrying, and among those who do, parenthood is increasingly delayed or deprioritised. A strong social ethic of postponement—finish studies, build a career, secure housing, achieve stability—pushes family formation ever later into a narrowing biological window. What begins as well-intended prudence often ends in regret.

At the same time, smaller cohorts mean fewer siblings, cousins and extended kin networks, weakening the informal support structures that once made raising children more manageable. The result is not just fewer births, but a compounding cycle: fewer families, fewer future parents, and a society progressively less oriented around children.

Now factor in the echo effect of this accelerated childlessness.

The projection of 19 grandchildren already assumes that fertility stabilises at today’s low level. But that assumption is optimistic. It presumes that the children born into a more strained environment—one with heavier caregiving burdens, fewer peers, higher fiscal pressure, and thinner social support—will reproduce at the same rate as their parents.

There are strong reasons to expect the opposite.

A smaller generation inherits a larger share of responsibility. Each working adult must support more elderly dependants, shoulder higher taxes, and navigate a society where childcare, eldercare and career demands collide more intensely. These pressures do not merely make life harder; they reshape incentives. Under such conditions, the perceived cost of having children rises further, and the appeal of postponement or childlessness grows stronger.

This is the echo effect: low fertility today creates conditions that depress fertility tomorrow. Fewer children lead to heavier burdens; heavier burdens lead to even fewer children. What begins as a decline becomes a feedback loop. In that light, the figure of 19 grandchildren is not a floor but a midpoint in a potentially steeper descent.

What “Personal Choice” Doublespeak Leaves Out

Politicians often say that having children is a “personal choice”. The phrase protects an important freedom. The state has no right to conscript bodies, marriages or homes into demographic service. Coercion would damage both family and child.

But the phrase also performs political work. It lets a government discuss fertility without telling voters that their decisions alter the burdens carried by others. No ruling party gains much from suggesting that some life scripts contribute more directly to national survival.

So we speak in two registers. When addressing adults, “children are a private choice”. When planning hospitals, defence, immigration, public finance and eldercare, they become a national necessity.

Yes, childless adults can lead generous lives through caregiving, charity or public work. Yet some goods enrich a society that already exists, while children make its continued existence possible.

Let me be plain: Without another generation, there will eventually be no future charity sector, electorate or civil service to enrich.

Responsible parenthood answers an existential need. This is why elective childlessness and parenthood cannot be flattened into morally equivalent lifestyle choices. Both may be lawful and understandable but they do not perform the same service for the future.

Singapore can preserve the freedom not to have children while speaking honestly about its consequences. That means holding two truths together without collapsing either. Individuals must remain free to decide whether to marry or have children, without stigma or coercion. But society must also acknowledge that when many choose not to have children, the costs do not vanish—they are redistributed. They appear later as heavier tax burdens, tighter labour markets, strained caregiving systems, and a smaller generation asked to sustain a larger one.

Honesty requires us to say that while childlessness may be a private decision, its effects are public. It shapes who will staff our hospitals, defend our borders, pay into our pension systems, and care for us in old age. A society that refuses to name this trade-off risks drifting into a quiet unfairness—one where some contribute to the future by raising children, while others benefit from that contribution without recognising its cost.

Assistance and Recognition

Singapore has reduced the cost of parenthood more successfully than it has restored its value and status. We have spent heavily to make family formation easier. Parents receive Baby Bonus payments, CDA support, childcare subsidies and parental leave. Infant-care places have nearly tripled in ten years, childcare places have nearly doubled, and fees have fallen.

Yet support has improved while fertility has continued to fall. Why?

The schemes ease the first stretch of parenting. They do not compensate the full undertaking. Most of the money pays for the child’s needs; it does not recognise the parents’ lost time, forgone CPF growth, reduced mobility or interrupted careers.

At the same time, parenthood should not become wage labour. Turning children into outputs and parents into vendors would corrupt the love and duty on which family life depends. The task is to recognise parenthood without commercialising it.

Who Carries the Ageing Burden?

A financially secure childless retiree may say that he has paid his own way. He saved into CPF, paid taxes and can purchase the services he needs. But savings create a claim on future labour; they do not create the people who will perform it. A retirement account can pay a nurse. It cannot produce one.

The number of elderly residents living alone more than doubled from 41,200 in 2015 to 88,400 in 2025. Caregivers report lower quality of life across every measured domain. Support ratios translate into hospital hours, urgent leave, bills divided among siblings, and sandwiched young parents who’re pulled between childcare and eldercare.

This is the structural burden that low fertility passes forward. The adult child must carry a larger share because too few people in the generation before him raised the citizens needed to sustain the system.

And that coveted “world’s best passport” that we are so proud of? The mobility it provides is likely to intensify our crisis. When younger Singaporeans see heavier taxes, high housing costs and mounting care responsibilities ahead, leaving can begin to look less like Goh Chok Tong’s old category of “quitting” and more like prudent escape. Those who remain will then inevitably inherit a larger share of the bill unless the R.O.I. on our national reserves somehow hits escape velocity.

Giving Children a Political Voice

It’s not a surprise that we now understand that a serious political response must move beyond grants.

First, Singapore could recognise years spent raising dependent children through CPF or retirement credits, treating caregiving years not as gaps in productivity, but as socially valuable labour that merits long-term security. For example, parents who spend extended periods out of the workforce to care for young children could receive CPF top-ups pegged to median wage growth, ensuring they are not permanently penalised in retirement for fulfilling a public good.

Second, Singapore could require formal intergenerational impact assessments for major decisions involving debt, housing, migration and healthcare. These will ask how today’s policies will affect future taxpayers, workers and caregivers. Just as environmental impact statements force governments to account for ecological costs, intergenerational statements would force policymakers to confront whether they are shifting burdens onto those not yet old enough to vote.

Third, it could give parents greater weight in consultations on education and family policy by recognising that they bear direct responsibility for raising the next generation. Things like structured representation, advisory councils, or weighted consultation mechanisms could ensure that those most invested in children’s outcomes have a stronger voice in shaping the systems that affect them.

Fourth, we could give parents two votes – this is not historically unusual. Here’s the logic: Children already possess interests in housing, education, healthcare, debt and the long-term shape of the country. Parents represent them in almost every other domain. Why should the ballot box pretend those interests do not exist until adulthood?

Parental proxy voting, sometimes called Demeny voting, would give each child a vote exercised in trust by a parent. The proposal corrects a lingering invisible bias within ageing democracies: the present can vote itself benefits while the generation that will pay for them has no seat at the table.

Raising children responsibly is generational work on which every future institution depends. Parents deserve practical help, public honour and a stronger voice for the children whose interests they carry. They are raising more than their own families. They are raising the people on whom the rest of us will one day depend.

Singapore cannot continue to take advantage of her parents and children for much longer, because sooner or later, they will get tired of the people who order the crab and beer, and expect them to also pay for it.