Singapore's total fertility rate is 0.87. That places us among the lowest in the world, alongside South Korea, Hong Kong, and Macau. A new government workgroup has just been formed. Ministers are going on podcasts. I know, because I listened to one this week.
The Straits Times' The Usual Place podcast featured Minister of State for Education Jasmin Lau in conversation about why young Singaporeans see having children as a loss rather than a gain. It was a good conversation. Honest, in parts. And it got me thinking, as a father of one in Singapore, about what I actually believe is going on.
I want to start by saying something that might sound obvious but rarely gets said directly: the question of whether to have a first child, and the question of whether to have a second, are not the same question. They shouldn't be treated as the same problem. Minister Lau made this distinction on the podcast and I think she was absolutely right to do so. And yet I think a lot of the current conversation, well-intentioned as it is, conflates the two in ways that make both harder to solve.
The First Child
Minister Lau made a point on the podcast that I think is worth sitting with. She said there is no universal policy that the government can push to tell women that children are more important than their careers. I'd go further. That's true for men too. And it points to something uncomfortable: for a significant number of Singaporeans, the decision not to have children is not a policy problem. It's a values decision. One made privately, between two people, that no Baby Bonus or tax incentive is going to reverse.
This is not a criticism. It is simply a reality. People who have decided they do not want children have made a legitimate choice about their own lives. Policy that tries to change that decision is not just ineffective. It is, in some ways, a category error. You cannot legislate someone into wanting a child they don't want.
So when we talk about Singapore's fertility problem, I think we need to be honest about what policy can and cannot reach. The first child decision, for many couples, is already made before any government scheme enters the picture. The more interesting and tractable question is the second one.
The Second Child
The decision to have a second child is a different conversation entirely. And this is where I think the current policy approach, however well meaning, is incomplete.
The government's answer to low fertility has been largely material. Financial grants. Subsidised preschools. Extended parental leave. These are not nothing. For many Singaporean families, cost is real and immediate and the assistance matters. I don't dismiss that.
But I want to offer a different data point. One that is personal and therefore anecdotal, but which I suspect resonates with more people than will admit it.
I am not actively trying to prevent a second child. Neither is my wife. We are simply okay either way. Not indifferent to the idea. Not opposed to it. But not driven toward it either. And when I examine why, honestly, the answer is not money. The answer is time. The answer is energy. The answer is that parenting in Singapore, done the way Singapore seems to expect it to be done, is an enormous undertaking. And I already feel the full weight of that undertaking with one.
The education arms race. The CCA arms race. The sense that every decision you make about your child's development carries consequences. The mental load of being a present parent in a city that never really slows down. These things don't show up in a cost of living calculation. But they are absolutely part of the calculation.
No government grant addresses that. Because you cannot subsidise time. You cannot top up energy with a cash transfer.
The Education Question
Let me be specific about what I mean by the education arms race, because I think it deserves more than a passing reference.
I did not do well in my PSLE. By Singapore's standards, the score I got is not one that opens doors. I scraped into a polytechnic, did a foundation year, made my way to law school, graduated, and built a career I am proud of.
In other words, I went through Singapore's education system, and by its own metrics, I failed it. And then I was fine.
That experience shaped how I think about education for my own daughter. My instinct, for a long time, was scepticism. Skip the hype preschools. Don't chase the tuition. Take all that money and put it into an overseas university fund. Send her abroad for her degree, let her come home with good credentials, and skip the anxiety of the local system entirely.
And then I changed her preschool. Three months in, I saw a difference. Real, observable difference. In her speech, her communication, her motor skills. A child I know intimately, changing in ways I could see.
So now I sit with this uncomfortable tension. I don't believe in the arms race. I have lived proof that you can lose every battle in it and still build a good life. And yet I can't deny what I saw in my daughter in three months.
This is the reality of parenting in Singapore. Even the sceptics get pulled in. Even the people who know better find themselves wondering if they're doing enough. The anxiety is not irrational. It is the water we swim in. And the idea of doing all of this, carrying all of this, for a second child. That is a weight that no subsidy addresses.
What I Actually Want to Say
Let me end with something that I think gets lost in all the policy discussion.
Having a child is profound. It is an inflection point in your life that no money or material good comes close to. Your child will bring you a joy you did not know was possible and simultaneously a worry you could never have anticipated. These two things coexist permanently, and no one warns you adequately about either.
My daughter changed my life. In more ways than one. I realised, not long after she arrived, that I need her just as much as she needs me. That is not something I expected to feel. And it is not something any government campaign told me to feel. It is simply what happened.
I think that is the message that is missing from Singapore's fertility conversation. Not the subsidies. Not the leave policies. Not the grants. Those things matter, but they speak to the head. Nobody is speaking honestly to the heart.
The government proved it could change behaviour with a campaign before. Stop at Two, launched in 1966, brought Singapore's fertility rate from 4.66 to replacement level in less than a decade. It worked because it spoke clearly to what people actually cared about at the time. But an NUS sociologist noted as far back as 1987, when the government first began to panic about falling birth rates, that a new generation of Singaporeans would not respond to financial incentives the way their parents did. That was nearly forty years ago. We are still learning the same lesson.
The question of the first child and the question of the second child need different answers. For the first: stop trying to make the economics work and start trying to make people feel what I feel when I look at my daughter. Show them what they stand to gain, not what it will cost them.
For the second: acknowledge honestly that the problem is not just money. It is exhaustion. It is a culture of parenting so intense, so high-stakes, so all-consuming, that even people who can afford another child are not sure they have enough of themselves left to give.
I don't have a policy prescription. I am a lawyer, not a minister. But I know that the conversation we are having is not yet honest enough. And honest conversations, in my experience, are usually where the real answers begin.