Key points at a glance:
- Singapore’s record-low fertility rate cannot be solved by cash handouts and grants alone.
- Many young adults avoid parenthood due to pessimism, childhood pain, and convenience.
- Direct subsidies only assist willing parents, leaving deeper cultural hesitations completely unaddressed.
- Voluntary childlessness forces the future care of ageing adults onto other people’s children.
- Reversing this decline requires framing family formation as an essential civic duty.
In this year’s National Day Rally (NDR) speech, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong prioritised Singapore’s crisis of low birth rates, while lightly touching on other global megatrends like AI and immigration. Where most topics were covered in 13 minutes or less, families and the record low Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 0.87 children per woman took up nearly twice that at 22 minutes.
| Topic | Time |
| A Dangerous World | 12min |
| AI Disruption | 10min |
| Social Media | 3min |
| Family, Total Fertility Rate | 22min |
| Immigration | 12min |
| Pipe Dreams | 13min |
| Singapore Spirit | 7min |
Nudging the Hesitant
Put simply, Singaporeans are not raising a new generation to replace themselves. Amid PM Wong’s announcement of support measures encouraging couples to have children, one cannot help but notice that the measures only target a segment of young Singaporeans.
In his words, “Young couples hesitate to start a family… These concerns are real. I have heard them from many parents. My colleagues have heard them too.”
These are couples who already desire to start a family or already have a few children, but have not overcome various fears to have another child. These fears could be the cost of living and increased responsibilities. With the government’s monetary nudge, perhaps these couples may feel temporary relief to start trying for a child.
However, there are other segments of young Singaporeans whose concerns are missed. These fears include:
- Fear of the future: that the world is becoming a worse place, and therefore it would be cruel to bring a child into such a world
- Fear of the past: that painful childhoods from bad parenting leads to repeating parental wounds to future generations
- Fear of inconvenience: that parenting leads to diminished quality of life
To address these deeper fears in Singaporeans, more has to be done beyond financial incentives.
Fear of the Future
PM Wong began his speech with an ice bucket of realism. Trade wars, global tensions and AI-related retrenchments form the backdrop for his call for solidarity in the face of external threats.
As a pricetaker for all economic and technological disruptions, Singapore cannot be complacent about geopolitical turmoil. At the same time, Singaporeans need to be reassured that they already have what it takes to thrive, and to have the courage to take risks like starting a family. We need to recount all the past giants we have overcome as a nation, not just those ahead of us.
We also need to remember how much better the world is today than it was for previous generations. Previous generations endured two world wars, the Cold War, and the Asian Financial Crisis, and yet they multiplied. Singaporeans’ catastrophising today might be overblown, with ominous doomsaying playing tricks on their sense of reality. We might be giving too much attention to distant threats in our daily lives that we cannot enjoy our immediate opportunities.
The stories we tell ourselves will determine whether we have the cultural resources to hope for the future. If the stories that we narrate to one another are about how brutal the world is and how climate change would destroy us all, then there is no impetus to be generous with our dreams for the future, but to hunker down in self-preservation.
One outlier developed country that has a high birth rate is Israel, despite facing terror from every side. This makes sense as the cultural stories they tell themselves are imbued with hope. They tell themselves stories like how their civilisation was enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, and yet they multiplied greatly for hope of liberation and finding their own land; stories like how their prophets commanded them to multiply despite being invaded and exiled, because they would be delivered. Each story reinforces a sense of possibility into their cultural imagination.
So, what are the stories that Singaporeans narrate to one another? Are we telling stories of fear, or stories of hope? Perhaps we should treat the TFR is an indicator of hope.
Fear of the Past
After speaking about geopolitics and AI, PM Wong lightly touched on the harms of social media on youths and promised to take action against errant social media platforms.
In his words, “Children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable. Their brains are still developing. They are more susceptible to social pressures and more easily hooked by features designed to keep them constantly engaged.”
This is a step in the right direction as social media distorts reality for many young Singaporeans. A trend on social media that young Singaporeans are susceptible to is to pathologise one’s childhood experiences as trauma and to self-diagnose psychological disorders. Young Singaporeans may find the language of trauma liberating, because these terms express the gravity of their negative emotions.
It is indeed true that some young Singaporeans have endured actual trauma from bad parenting. However, the ubiquity of framing negative childhood experiences as trauma may colour these experiences out of proportion to what they have actually undergone. This trend disempowers young Singaporeans from overcoming negative emotions, leading many to conclude that they are irredeemably broken, and therefore unfit to parent the next generation for fear of perpetuating the same “trauma” to the next generation.
Young Singaporeans need to be affirmed that Singapore is a better place because of them, that no matter how broken they feel, their friendship and contribution are valuable. If broken people can contribute, we should give ourselves a chance, and we should give children a chance.
And if we affirm the value of each Singaporean, perhaps we won’t feel so broken after all.
Affirming the value of each Singaporean also directly confronts misanthropic narratives festering on social media, like the idea that human beings are bad for the planet, or that people are permanently malevolent and prejudiced.
While each idea alone does not motivate childlessness, their cumulative effect is a misanthropic cynicism about the idea of having children at all.
Fear of Inconvenience
What is missing from PM Wong’s speech is encouraging Singaporeans to get married and have children. There are those who unfortunately cannot find suitable spouses, who are unable to conceive or who are called to celibacy for religious service. This section is not about these people.
This section is about those who are against having children because they fear personal inconvenience. Parenting involves lifestyle tradeoffs including career opportunities and leisure. Therefore some do not consider legacy or generational impact to be worth the personal sacrifice. Some go even further by living the mantra: “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”
These mindsets are hedonistic at root, and manifest as the Double Income No Kids (DINKs) and “pawrent” (that is, considering pets on par with children) lifestyles.
Where the government dares not tread is to campaign with the message that family formation is more meaningful and responsible than a hedonistic lifestyle. The government needs to make this value judgement because persuasion requires comparison with the alternatives.
Who supports those who are pleasure-first when they are aged? Who finances their geriatric healthcare, elderly infrastructure and welfare schemes? Would it not be taxes from other people’s children? If the government accepts hedonism as a lifestyle choice, it decides that it is indeed the responsibility of other people’s children to look after aged hedonists.
Minister Indranee Rajah, who is in charge of the Marriage & Parenthood (M&P) Reset Workgroup, recently said:
“Decisions on whether to get married and start a family are deeply personal. And as we have found in our engagements, mindsets matter a great deal when making these decisions. When we say we want to change mindsets, it is not about pushing a single “correct” path.”
While family formation is deeply personal, it is not private. It has wide-ranging public consequences including immigration, national security and economic policy. While there is no “correct” path in life, a life of hedonism is the wrong path for Singapore’s survival.
If the government does not offer conviction leadership to campaign on this matter, it is up to civic institutions like religious leaders to pick up the slack.
The Common Denominator
Every reason for refusing family formation is negative. Some fear that the world is too scarce to accommodate dreams of having a family. Some fear that their interior world is inadequate for the task. Others fear that having children will reduce the pleasure they feel in life.
But if the future is truly abundant, the proportion of bad news we tell the young must diminish. If no one is irredeemably broken, then young people need to be affirmed for their intrinsic worth more than their performance. If having children is a public good, then society needs to assign a value judgement to frivolous living.
While the government’s financial incentives work for those who already value family formation, a fundamental rethink of values is needed for those who are opposed. The question the government needs to ask itself is this:
Is family formation a lifestyle choice, or is it a civilisational virtue?
The answer will determine whether the government has the latitude of policy levers to resolve our low birth rate crisis.
