Singapore’s Falling Birth Rates
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Singapore’s falling birthrates
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Singaporeans are not reproducing. According to the 2007 CIA World Factbook, our total fertility rate (children born per woman) is a paltry 1.07, making us the third least fertile nation. Japan’s total fertility rate is 1.23 and the UK is 1.66. The world fertility rate average for 2007 was 2.59
The number is so worrying that heads of our island State recently rolled out a number of pro natal measures to combat this worrying trend. The new baby bonus now includes a four-month maternity leave, a $4,000 cash gift and $6,000 government grant. But is that enough? Unfortunately, for most, the answer was a resounding NO! So what would entice Singaporean parents to have more kids?
With that question in mind, we send our journalist Katherine Tan, to the streets to talk to readers. This is what they had to say!
1) The government needs to do more. First, reduce the levy for maids according to how many kids you have. If you have more than four children you should not even have to pay for levy, period. –Rani Kaur, 31
2) Increase days off for sick children leave. It should be at least one week for each parent. When kids fall sick, they aren’t just sick for one or two days. They fall ill for nearly a week! – Sumita Menon, 29
3) It all boils down to one simple word. SEX. As the Durex survey suggested, we aren’t having enough sex. Singaporeans are still close-minded about having sex. The parliament should start a campaign to make it fashionable to have sex. – Simon Lin, 32
4) While an icreased baby bonus is appreciated, we should get equally for 1st, 2nd, 3rd baby and so on. It takes the same amount of effort to raise each child! – Sandra Tan, 28
5) Increase maternity leave. Four months is not long enough. We should be like Sweden, where all working parents are entitled to 18 months’ paid leave per child. – Roshni Shah, 25
6) Give daddy longer paternity leave, so he can help with tending to the baby. – Bai Ling, 27
7) Let working mothers bring their kids to work (provide childcare services for working mother) so we can be with our kids during lunch time. – Monica Lim, 26
There should be more home-based jobs for mothers, so we can work from home and at the same time take care of our kids. – Iris Sim, 29
9) The government should enforce a regulation to enforce company to hire mothers as part-timers so that they can be with the child. – Nita Rao, 34
10) Education and childcare should be free-of-charge up till University level. – Rishi Maniam, 39
11) Children should get free health care up to age 21. – Terence Oh, 36
12) Parents in Singapore pay a lot for basic necessities like milk powder and diapers. We should receive vouchers to redeem them for a subsidised rate. – Tejwinder Singh, 33
13) We should have a scheme where the more children you have, you are entitled to upgrade your HDB to a bigger flat or to a condo. E.g. Only 1 child, can only buy 3 room flat. With 2 children, you can buy 3 or 4 room flat and so on. Couples with no children are not entitled to buy anything more than a 3 room flat. – Kalvin Tam, 38
14) The fact remains that when resources are scarce, and when they don’t have much help, women will postpone motherhood. In Singapore, we need to make sure it is affordable to have a child and make sure that our domestic helps are quality and not just quantity. We need to make sure the maids we import in are capable of handling children, so we are comfortable to leave our kids with the maid. – Siti Haslinah, 35
15) Make Singapore more baby friendly. Build more nursing rooms in shopping centres and playgrounds for kids to play at. Offer baby-sitting services at restaurants and gyms. – Dominic sun, 22
16) Offer two weeks heavily subsidized camps for kids above three years. That way parents are “free” to even consider procreating. Otherwise we are so bogged down with our first child; we can’t even begin to consider the prospects of expanding our brood. – Lina Lau, 26
17) One reason that I don’t want children is that I am a career woman. I am not the sort to quit my job if I have kids, and yet I don’t want to leave my child with a maid. So schools should increase their hours to match with work days. Schools shouldn’t start at 7 am, but at 8.30 and it should not end at 2 but at 6. Breakfast, lunch and dinner should be provided at school (either through the canteen or lunch box), as well as a nap time. So when we come home, we will not be bogged down with homework and feeding the kids, but we can spend quality time. – Tan Li Fern, 30
18) We need to start educating our children about having children. Not just should we offer design and technology and home economics in school, we should have a handling a baby class. A lot of us, men, are terrified of babies, because we have never been around them. If we are exposed to babies from a young age, it wouldn’t be so foreign when we finally have one! – Prem Gohel, 37
What are your thoughts? How can we increase our birth rates? Share them below!
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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1) Longer maternity leave
2) Longer paternity leave
3) Family tax breaks
4) Flexible work hours
5) Reduction on CEO prices for parents with more kids
6) Women should be compensated to stay at home and look after their kids. I believe French women get paid $1000 a month to play homemaker
Singapore parents need to spend more time nmaking love! that’s the only way to increase our birthrate
Hey folks,
I’lll tell you the REAL reason(s) why Singaporeans are not giving birth as follows:
1) People getting smarter and realising that children are good-for-nothing, eating-machines that may or may not take care of you when you’re old. It’s a big risk for so much time/money/heartache.
2) A big risk, if your kids turn out well, firstly, “touch wood” no defects (e.g. birth defects), for which YOU the parent & the child will be suffering for the rest of your life.
3) Thereafter, you have to take care of all kinds of nonsense from toddler brats, to worrying about their school performance, exams, mixing with the wrong crowd, teenage pregnancy, drugs, gangs, tatoos, their future spouse…etc.etc. more vices in the modern world than you have MTV channels.
4) Even after much struggle for decades, and hopefully with good memories along the way, IF (that’s a BIG IF), your child turns out to be a great doctor/lawyer/successful whatever, don’t assume that they will not kick your sorry ass to some old-folks home in Johor Bahru, if you don’t have some big inheritance for them. Look, they will have their own problems & busy schedules when they grow up…just like you have yours now.
5) Ask yourself, do you have traits of Brad Pitt / Jennifer Aniston / Eienstein / Warren Buffett / Michael Phelps / Tiger Woods etc. Do you & spouse have great intelligence/physique/beauty or tons of money? If not, what are the chances that you will pro-create a better human being that will prosper in this highly competitive world ? You need lots of $ to educate your child today to compete effectively in tomorrow’s complex world. We don’t live in fishing villages anymore, and if your child is not given the best in learning, thinking skills, technology, social behaviours etc. etc., they will lose out to the richer & better endowed kids. I have seen VAST differences between the behaviours/skills of Hokkien-vulgarities-expert average bloke and those that have a certain “finesse” in the way they talk & perform their work…and easy to see who comes from the better or richer family with healthier exposure. No prizes for guessing who wins the promotion or better jobs in this highly competitive world….and the cycle repeats often.
Yeah, I know all the philosophy about “Humans are not skin-deep”, or “Nature vs. Nurture” so on and so forth, but lets get real. until genetic engineering is legalised, read the science yourself, chances are, you’re lucky if your child is mediocre in all respects and not worse than average.
6) So, why create more average Joe’s/Janes when the world is already over-populated, polluted and filled with wars, pestilence, poverty and unimaginable suffering.
7) Ask yourself why the government have such a damn interest in your personal decision to have children or not? You think the government really CARE about you? NO! They care about their future tax dollars and sufficient manpower/slaves to feed the current elitist power structures. They are running short of NS men and also work slaves tax base to feed off. That’s why they are even willing to pay a bit of $ upfront to “BS” the public into having more kids. You think the government will bother about your kids if you lose your job or your baby starts screaming at 3am everyday?
I agree with points 6,8, 10, 11 and 13.
pt 6 : my husband only gets 2 paternity leaves for my 3 deliveries. which I personally felt it shld increase to at least a wk ( or 5 days )
pt 8 : I’m a stay home mum with 3 kids at age 1 , 3 and 5. It’s really very difficult to get a full time job outside with no helper. even PT time jobs are not realistic to both time and salary as the wages are usually low and travelling time + fare makes the wages = 0 or even negative. I hope there will be a home based assignments for stay home mums to save of travelling time and make good use of hands while “babies are asleep”.
pt 10 & 11: Truely agree on free education and healthcare is a must for all children till Uni. (esp for couples having more than 1 child.)
pt 13 : Both hands up agreeing on the point. where bigger families need a bigger space area. couples who only have 1 or no kids shld be able to apply for only 3 room or the most 4 room. and let the couples with 2 or more children to apply a bigger flat with extra subsidies. they wanna get a bigger hse not bcoz they are rich but bcoz of the space needed for the family. and I would hope govt shld reconsider removing the bank loan for HDB flats. Especially for those for really wanna upgrade/downgrade for the best of their family. bank loan had frighten ppl from moving hse to find a suitable hse when their family has expanded and pocket tightened. bank loan are supposily for ppl who wanna get private property not for the hdb flat buyers!
basically we’re getting more self-centered, more materialistic. it’s all about me, me, me; such that we’ve lost the meaning of family. the society doesn’t help by making it unfavourable for women to have kids, the work late culture, the giving of kids under the care of people other than the mum/dad, the glorifying of women had it all, or made it, such that women feel like they need to keep up to that ideal and feel bad when they don’t. etc etc…it’s a complicated cycle.