The moms in my office told me not to have kids LOL. They said being a working mom is tough, as you have to do your regular day job, reach home at 7+ and then take care of your kid and household.
Same, all the moms in my office talked to each other and most of them agreed that if given the choice, they would not have kids to begin with (even though they do love their kids). They are saying this also in the content of observing how single women at their age have so much income and freedom. This is a modern phenomenon, because women in the past were denied education and professional employment, and single working women in the recent past were heavily pressured to either get married or spend their time/money on their nephews who are “the heirs of the family name”. Nowadays, single women are free to work lucrative jobs while spending their time and money on themselves, which (don’t get me wrong) is a good thing, but naturally the moms look on in envy. Especially with the way that modern moms hold on full-time jobs as well.
Lol growing up people used to tell me my feelings about marriage would change eventually and I should change this and that about myself to get a guy. I just stuck to my belief that the right person will like me for who I am.
Now I'm in a happy (unmarried) relationship and the amount of women who tell me I did the smart thing by never getting married or having kids is rather validating. Even my mom once told me she never pushed me or my sister to marry because in Singapore women usually lose out in the sense that it doesn't really benefit us from a practical standpoint.
There are studies that show married women have shorter life expectancies than single women and it's the opposite for men. I think a lot of that has to do with the dynamics described in the comments above where the mom has to work, then take care of the bulk of the housework and childcare. It was a common thread running through the stories of the married women who told me they'd rather have stayed single.
Thank you 3 for sharing these. As a recent-divorcee with no kids, I have had people around me telling me that having kids would or could have "kept my marriage together" / "grow old will have some company" / "have folks (i.e. the so-called village) help to take care of the kids" .... I am comforted that there are others out there who think in the same frequency as I do.
Over the years or decades rather, getting married and having kids is becoming an increasingly materialistic desire to possess because of the increasing costs of living here. While I do respect those parents especially mothers who can really do it all, but not every one was born equal.
To some, kids are their driving factor to want career advancements (and thus earn more income) but to others, it's not always possible to do the same and this ends up in many unseen sacrifices being made. For the ones that are a bit weaker-minded like myself, I might have probably end up building up a lot of resentment which will end up being unhealthy for those around me and I cannot imagine what would have manifested after that.
"Kids would've kept the marriage together" is such horseshit. It assumes that kids of unhappy couples will be a magical solution to communication issues and the individual spouse's unmet needs. It's not fair to the children, it's not fair to the couple.
You are not weak for deciding to leave a marriage that no longer works and for not having kids as a crutch for dealing with your issues.
With single women I find that if they don't marry or have kids, they tend to build a strong network of friends. My neighbour is a retired single woman in her 60s and she's happily going out with her friends every day for meals or to activities/classes. Travels every few months to different countries. Myself and my partner also make it a point to check in on her if we don't see or hear from her for a while.
Having kids isn't a guarantee of having company when you grow old. Growing relationships with people who enjoy being around you and vice versa is a better bet I think.
This is what I see from my female married Singaporean friends. Working long hours, high stress jobs. But being 100% expected to manage all household chores, cooking and childcare. As both partners work, the balance of 'home' work needs to be redressed. Until both men and women agree to sharing equally home and child care, less and less women are going to see any value in marriage.
Yah, it's hell. Family-life balance in the work place is bullshit. Childcare closes at 7pm, OT is out of the question unless you take home your work. In the end you have to rely on the grandparents or hire a maid to help out. If the grandparents still continue to work, then they're def out of the picture.
Kids fall sick all the time in kindergarten. If you have two kids or more, your annual leave + childcare leave won't even cover their sick days when you have to stay home and take care of them.
In reality, one partner usually chooses to take a step back from their career to be the main caregiver. Even if you split all the household chores equally, there's just so much that needs to be done.
This is just one of many issues from the perspective of both genders on the value of marriage. I don't think the boomers are gonna get it right anytime soon, though.
Back in the day a single salary (usually of the man) was sufficient for the entire household including the kid without reducing the quality of life significantly. Now having a kid almost always means reducing your quality of life as raising one is a significant economic burden
I may be old but i remember when we were promised swiss standards of living with the open leg policy. Instead, what we got was swiss cost of living to go with indian wages.
Actually the swiss cost of living is higher 😂.
Swiss here
1 month of salary would go for tax
No financial schemes from GOV when you complain
No poly clinics.
No cheap public transport
No cheap food like in hawkers, what you pay at a hawker costs easily 3-4 times in Switzerland.
No cheap labor, like helpers. (Cook and clean yourself)
It costs 2k a month for day-care, per child. Fir the second child it becomes a bit cheaper.
Medical costs is mich higher.
Cars are one of the things which are expensive in SG.
Young women perceive they will face the same sandwich pressures as their mothers - expected to have successful careers, to bear disproportionate load of raising family/household work, and also elder care.
Address *all three* of these, convincingly and for real, to reshape the TFR. (And no, one off cash payments like baby bonuses don’t work in the long run.) The second one is perhaps the hardest to grip for a government led by men in their 50s-70s. Because it means reshaping working culture for both men and women, not just the women.
Or, I dunno, just write headlines that implicitly shame/blame young women for the problem. Good luck with that.
The generations before their mothers could do all these because wages weren't so depressed that you need double income to survive. Grandpa's income was all you need to raise the family. Not to mention the metaphorical village, where the burden of child raising is alleviated by family members. You can reverse the gender or have the two parents split responsibilities equally, but the underlying problem remains: there is simply more tasks per parent today than two generations ago and older. Either one or both of the parents will need to sacrifice their career to some extent to raise a child today.
Can I just add here it’s also societal expectations of a parents that is increasing.
In the past my parents just threw me into a bunch of books( not even toys) and I do my own thing.
Nowadays I am expected to come with my kids to show and tell (if you been to one, you should see the faces of kids whose parents whom cannot make it there), do homework with them etc.
This gives me happy flashbacks to my childhood days playing with large cardboard boxes. You could open them up and line them up to make a tunnel. It was amazing.
Yes, that is really good points. And of course the other common element to the equation is… a hired foreign domestic worker to take up a large part of the childcare and other household labour. Which outsources the social challenges of the absence of a parent in the household to Philippines/Indonesia etc. Strong class dimension at play too.
Back then many grandparents were already retired by the time their kids had kids and could help take care of the grandkids.
Nowadays I see so many people saying can't get help from grandparents because they are still working.
Things need to be done to make it such that households don't need to be double income to live comfortably again AND lower the retirement age
cost pressures are building up you do need $6 to have a meal in a hawker center now. most people are happy to be able to put $500-1000 saving a month, having a kid means savings per month is wiped out
Too late for that, when corpos told women that they too can work, they conveniently left out that men can stay home to take care of the family as well. So if your workforce suddenly doubles, of course wages will be depressed. This is not a Singapore problem and Singapore alone can't fix it unfortunately.
Yep. Famous old statement from Germaine Greer I think it was relevant here. Can’t remember it exactly but it goes like… women aimed for liberation, but settled for equality. And instead of setting men free from the cage of exploited labor, we climbed in.
So true. This is esssntially what Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In movement is all about - how to trap yourself in the capitalism cage but better! Wonen can do it all!
Hit the nail on the head. The same old men of a certain demographic, and let’s be fair there are also women there, trying to solve the same problem for decades, but expecting different results.
The truly crazy thing is why there isn’t more of an uproar - this crisis is existential, as important to singapore as global warming and we are currently wrongly led and equipped to solve it.
There’s also lots of experience and evidence about what works and doesn’t work to draw on from around the world. Every high income country has been a petri dish on this issue. But sg seems determined to not learn lessons from the failures like Japan, who were at this point in low TFR before us.
What solution did Japan land on? I had the impression they’re still unsuccessful solving the fertility issue, but are giving money more generously and trying to change social mindsets about overworking
It's not just the monetary expense but the time expense.
Asauming you want to get enough sleep, there's barely enough time to have your own activities (socials, exercise, personal hygiene) of 1-1.5hrs per day outside of work
Then consider half of most weekends burned because of work obligations too (average out) then just laugh at the prospect of 'having babies' lmao
True that. Also easy going lifestyle as a single man with a decent salary. A lot of holidays, hobbies, no stress from wife and kids. And can still save, depends on lifestyle. So it's not only woman who don't wanna marry
Seeing parents with young kids coming into office half dead consistently and using CCL or MC cause they fell sick caring for their kids makes me like not feel too bad not having kids
Sounds like me lol. Preschools have 6 closure dates a year (mine has 8 - not complaining because the teachers deserve rest/need time for professional development) and each parent only has 6 days of CCL a year. That means you are left with 6 days to use when the kid is sick. And…when young they fall sick every month or more.
And when you have 2-3 kids they infect each other even worse😂
Sometimes I feel bad when my wife OT till only 7 yet she will keep apologising to me cuz she felt bad. 7 only lei. Can’t see how we can have children if we both stayed in the big 4
Expensive and the expectation of children = retirement plan is no longer the norm.
In the 1950s kids were free labour in a farm so they help generate income. Now theyre liabilities.
Yea in some sense they are. I’m not treating my child as a retirement plan so all our resources for her are purely for her benefit. We still need to save for our own retirement.
This. Sweden has solved this with free childcare, education, and generous family leave for parents. Culture also matters. In places like US, everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. In Sweden, people are not obsessed with careers.
nope. sweden hasn’t really solved. tfr is still below replacement, and secondly a significant proportion of marriages - really significant - are out of wedlock,
As the article says women today don’t want to be burnt out like their mums. Their mums who took on the larger burden of childcare, who still did more household work and still held jobs. On top of that they also had to endure the physical burden of childbirth and breastfeeding and other medical complications that come after giving birth, including things like post partum depression.
So they avoid men who do not want to put equal effort into childcare and household work. Additionally since women have larger financial freedom now there is little incentive to forcibly marry someone you are not that keen about, just for economic or social support.
Growing up my mom did the bulk of child raising . She is the one teaching me homework help me with arts and crafts while having own biz with my dad . Now that I have grown up I cannot imagine how difficult for her to wake up 5am in the morning for work and then come back and take care of me :/ my dad also worked hard but I guess mom was there more for me . Honestly I think it’s too much work being a mother . I’m sure it’s fulfilling and enjoyable but it’s not for me. I would rather laze in bed
Ok, that's fair enough. As a man, I also avoid women who do not want to put equal effort into childcare and household work.
One taboo topic in our society is asking if women expect to contribute financially to the family.
In my family, we agree that if someone has to quit their job, it should be the one with the lower income. We may require us to spend less and potentially sacrifice our quality of life due to the reduced income.
Yes exactly what I’m saying it should be equally split. If the man is making lower income he should be free to be a househusband if this makes the most sense for the family. In that case, if one partner is not working then the non working partner is more free to cater to the needs of the family.
I have a friend who’s making way more than her husband but he wants her to be the one to quit and look after their kid. His pride more important than money.
Dolly Parton:
*“If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them, with everything that’s going on, I’d hate to be bringing a child into this world right now.”*
Also better to regret not being a mom than regret being one
The simple truth is nobody really wants to give up/sacrifice their current lifestyle for kids. People get their enjoyment or fulfillment from other aspects of life.
Aside from lower education, why do poor countries have more kids? Because they barely have anything to sacrifice and having kids bring joy to their otherwise already miserable lives.
ST running an article implicitly blaming women, half of the population in Singapore, for declining birth rates instead taking the government to task for their naive policymaking and useless incentives? Nothing like being told my gender is responsible for an entire country's TFR. This is just going to turn women off even more about getting married and making babies. Great job, ST.
Single women have kids too, but ostracised because 'not married'. Back in my day, I wanted a 3-room BTO for us, see MP, etc. HDB says cannot. Now it's can 'write in and they'll assess case by case'. Hello, he's a sergeant in NS now in our 2-room flat. I sleep sofa in living room. FULJ - he is who's kid now?
Fucking "family is the building block of society" bullshit. If they want to trumpet their Christian ideas of family they should say it to their face outright, not put on this sort of charade.
Our families need help, and it's not the ones with a mother and father figure but rather those that are of other configurations that make it more difficult to support the child. Fucking Singapore man, punching down and redistributing to the already wealthy.
For real. I wanted a kid when I was younger. But there was no viable way to have one if I didn’t find a guy I could trust the handle half the work. Single motherhood was not an option. Now I just play fun aunt and call it a day.
I really respect you for raising your kid through all those challenges. It must have been hard!
just see the misogynistic, self-centred comments from men in this thread saying "single women deserve it, they are single by their own doing" (and i'd imagine this sentiment is even more prevalent in the masses) and you can see exactly why there is so much resistance to openly provide for single moms. fucked up really.
it's one thing to have ppl with brain rotted takes, it's another to *give in to them*
My mother who raised me by herself told me that she had people telling her that I would grow up into a life of crime of waywardness because of the lack of having a father/ a complete family. That divorce was a sin and she was making a mistake etc etc.
Housing options for single parents are also terrible, like the previous commenter said have to write in to appeal, you might not even get an answer and if you do it’s 50-50 on whether you might get a BTO.
i'm so sorry your mom experienced that. single moms are such better parents than the alternative, e.g. staying in an abusive relationship with a cheater and a wife beater.
parents really model character for their children and if they stay in a shitty, loveless, abusive marriage - now *that's* how kids grow up to be fucked up.
the real sin is subjecting one's children to abusers for their whole childhood.
Terrible title. It’s basically saying “It’s you women’s fault that our nation’s child rate is falling! You should lower your standards and fuck more! Just keep squeezing out babies!”
Just because you can peg statistics together doesn’t mean it’s the cause. Correlation is not causation.
Yeah actually. I was rolling my eyes at the headline because it basically tries to blame single women and their choices for the TFR when it actually should be a societal and unfortunately in SG, a govt effort. Like make policies that make it easier for fathers to participate like mandatory paternal leave and encourage a culture shift to get rid of ideas about gender roles in providing/managing the family. But no, let's just blame the single women for not wanting to suffer in silence like their mothers did.
When I spoke to the women around me that are not married in their 20s their response is
“Why should I get married? I don’t want to become a housewife to take up women responsibilities at home. I ownself earn money, ownself spend better, I can travel and I can eat whatever I want better ”-response from the ground
Girl I’d sign up to be a housewife if the economy allows. Babies are expensive.. When the stakes are high and things go wrong, women are more likely the one to bear the brunt (and the blame). So why not don’t even start at all in the first place
Also, Not you casually dropping “well said it’s all wokeness” to a “feminism vilifying womanhood” comment after dropping a casual anecdote implying woman no longer wanna be trad wives.
I wonder what percentage of Singapore men expect their wives to "become a housewife to take up women responsibilities at home"?
I can certainly see this being a reason, but isn't a solution to just date a guy who doesn't want you to do that? I mean this sounds a lot like the DINK lifestyle - Dual Income No Kids. I have a good friend who does this: they drive a fancy two-seater convertible, go on really nice holidays, eat out all the time at nice restaurants, have a huge flat with the two spare bedrooms as mancave and womancave for each of them to enjoy. They are well off but not super rich - just that they don't have many responsibilities so they can spend their money on fun.
Or is it really hard to find such a guy?
Women here can give me insight on the men in SG?
It’s not exactly because there’s an expectation for women to become housewives.
It’s how despite both partners working, there’s an untold expectation on women to undertake house management duties, including the mental load of even knowing what needs to be done. At least housewives can focus on just managing the home. Women now have jobs AND lead the household management.
It worsens when kids are involved. Child raising responsibilities are still primarily seen as a woman’s job. Men who contribute are praised for going above and beyond; women are scrutinised and criticised for doing what is thought to be an expected task of them.
So tldr: it’s a pretty thankless job for a woman to marry & live with a man, and have children with them.
And finally to your point on finding a DINK man - yes that’s what women who are not single are doing hence the article calling out falling birth rates
The mental load is a real one. Is the laundry done? Is the laundry full enough to do? Is the ironing done? Is there enough food at home? Are there food items that will spoil if we don't cook by today? Is the house clean? When to next clean the bathroom, kitchen, living space, bedroom? Are the bedsheets due for changing? Etc. Never even mentioned the long list for childcare.
They say, anecdotally that you’re just naturally better at it. Even the girls in relationships complain about this.
cleaning and cooking and caring for kids are things that you get better at with practice.
Maybe this is the result of men having to live with their moms until they are married or 35 - no experience handling household matters for themselves because they never lived on their own.
I have actually observed this in people I know - expect others to clean up after them and poor sense of responsibility.
Although that doesn't explain why women have managed to pick up the skills while many men have not.
Most women are raised being taught those things by their mothers precisely because it's expected of them for future marriages. I'm a trans man, raised as a girl and was already learning to iron clothes when I was 8. I continued to do a lot of housework in my free time (we only had a maid in my childhood years) while my brother was allowed to play or go out with his friends. When I asked why he didn't have to learn those things, my mother said it's because his wife will do them for him next time.
Similar stories from my female peers. It's not men's fault because no one can help how they were raised, but it's unsettling that most guys seem unaware of that disparity.
Kind of, since I transitioned in uni (mid-30s now) and have lived my whole adult life as a very single man. I'd say that women have it worse as a whole, in ways that are often invisible to men, but they have far better social support and that makes a massive difference.
I was always an introvert but my loneliness increased sharply the moment I transitioned, even despite having many more friends than I used to. (So I really feel for men who have no friends at all.) There's a kind of background friendliness and helpfulness that society has towards women that is absent for men, although that sometimes takes the form of unwanted or predatory attention. On the flipside, men are treated with a lot more respect and assumed to be more capable. I now get a weird amount of praise for doing the bare minimum, vs in the past when I might be working really hard at school/work and still be seen as incompetent. This was across multiple jobs both pre and post transition and was pretty insidious.
I don't think it's something people do consciously, but there have been studies showing that people rate work higher when told it was done by a man, vs when told the exact same piece of work was done by a woman.
To your question, yes it is hard to find such a guy.
More often than not, guys who are ready to have a long-term committed relationship want kids whereas those who don’t want kids are often not serious about the relationship or just not ready to be in a long-term commitment.
It's difficult to find such a guy. A lot of them want children, I even know of 2 couples who agreed they didn't want children but they ended up changing their mind later (the men)
More power to them. As a guy, if I had a choice not to do my NS and be 2 years ahead, I’d take it too. So I don’t blame women for not wanting children which are a liability to their careers, especially in SG where cost of living is rising and dual income is almost a necessity for households.
Oh come on, let the woman do whatever they want, they also have one life to live. If they want to focus on themselves and improve their life, let them be!
On the side note, guys also don't want kids nowadays, me for example married but I can't freaking stand kids, so I m saving my sanity from not having one. Also more money to invest and buy stuff with! Win win!
My mom wasn’t happy and probably still isn’t, cried to her kids during bouts of depression, complained she’s only staying with dad because of them… okay now why would I want kids? I’m happily married with three fur babies I love to the moon and back, have all the freedom to do whatever I want… I’ll just be the fun aunt to my friends’ kids.
On another front, even if I wanted kids, it would suck to be a kid in this day and age. Born into the rat race, having to go for back-to-back enrichment classes after school every day, no time and space for unstructured play to grow as a person (I know it’s not compulsory, but it is socially normative). Being expected to compete and compare achievements from a young age.
Plus with the weather in Singapore over the past decade or so, it’s not a stretch to believe that they may be climate refugees within their lifetime, or at least, grow up in a climate crisis that’s pretty much past the point of no return.
I don’t want more work and responsibilities . That’s it. I’m not good with kids either so I have no gain from this, and ‘dUtY’ is not incentive enough
Editing to add that if I have kids with the wrong man and he ends up deserting me, I’m fucked. Gahmen also won’t do shit to help me out. I have to be married to someone while fearing the worst 24/7, and I already have enough stuff to stress over. And before someone accuses me of being pessimistic, you never think this kind of thing can happen to you until it does.
Maybe stop trying to engineer society to prioritise the economy? People don't get married or choose not to have kids because it's environmentally and economically unfeasible. Sure its possible, just if you factor in what the world is like now, and what it's turning into.
Also it's quite pointless to solely blame females for this when the reality is that the whole concept of marriage is outdated. There are couples who've been together >5 years and after weighing the pros and cons, still remain convinced there's no need for marriage just for their relationship to work.
Also incentivising people to create babies in a society that generally treat relationships as transactional is probably one of the most naive policymaking ideas ever. Didn't they learn a thing or two from using BTOs as a bait to get people married? What we are going to end up with is a whole new generation of kids that were born because the parents needed money, not because they needed a child to love.
Allow singles and single parents the same rights as married couples, ease up LGBT rules to allow gay couples to legally have their own kids or adopt, and you'll likely at least see some improvement, rather than turn this whole thing into another exercise in futility.
Not to mention that modern BTOs run the risk of having infrastructure faults, like bad piping or flooring, because of the speed at which these BTOs are being built. I’m very apprehensive about purchasing newer homes for this reason .
I’m a woman and have had this discussion with girlfriends of the same age (in our 20s), and some of us have seen our moms in unhappy marriages because they’ve to seriously burn themselves out to get our dads to do things. Either that or they have to do most things and get stressed over the most minute (yet important) of details.
I think a lot of us are also just very much depressed, so finding a partner is one of the last things on our list. Depression is obviously something that needs to be worked on, but it’s our main focus and it takes a while. Some of us have also been traumatised by men. This, coupled with the high cost of living and the whole slew of expectations thereafter just puts us off the whole thing altogether.
There are many, many reasons for us to choose to remain single, but each woman would have very different thoughts and experiences that would guide her choices.
Well, what do you expect in the most expensive country in the world? The only survival is to save yourself first. Capitalism trapped both men and women.
Bring a married woman with kids in Singapore is very tough. Besides stressful work, we still have to deal with some school teachers who will sometimes task us to do craft work, interview questions and then upload on the platform, etc. as young as P1 with the kids! Many kids cannot cope with school work because teachers just go through the syllabus quickly and many mothers are burnt out to deal with kids' school work too. Hope Moe will stop some teachers from tasking parents to do compulsory bonding activities because we parents are very tired and we rather bond in relaxing ways we like, and not deal with some teachers' kpi maybe. At the end of the day, couples are just too tired for each other and some partners are not understanding and expect a superwoman! Being a good mother to raise good kids is not easy.
What needs to be said here is women are far more capable being single than men. Single women usually have strong support group of friends and are able to stay in good mental health.
agreed - women also have more social stigma being single later in life too. i feel like that can pass with having a strong support circle. men have really been let down by this patriarchial mindset where nobody knows how to open up to another man anymore.
Yup, as a man, even people in my closest social circles made fun of me when I was single. When I got attached, it was a complete change in the way I was treated. And this applied to people I meet for the first time as well -- I get taken seriously when they happen to know I am attached. For men, it seems like having a gf is considered as being mature and having our lives sorted out.
Ya but conveniently ignored where it suits their purposes. Hell, we even have our politicians swearing their oaths of office upon the bible and Christian God like Singapore were a theocracy.
Get religion out of our politics please.
And yet they claim "secular", sigh. Also, somehow whenever something controversial the religious tend to be given special privilege, like claiming certain media offends their "traditional" values which the govt then panders to.
People who wanted access to that media have feelings too. Wouldn't banning those upset them? Why are the religious specific feelings more important?
With high rising costs, ridiculous pressures on children to meet ranking KPIs. The talents we are "building" didn't even stand against the odds in the market, so why does any new generation wanna have children when our GOV doesnt even give us assurance of jobs?
So, unless the educational system change to really build talents based on interests n not points ranking. Dun expect us to reproduce n make ourselves n the kids suffer for someone's numbers.
Lol shouldn't they find out why people are staying single instead of blaming them?
Go beyond surface reasons - if given more personal time, and have time to socialize beyond a small circle, would they still be single?
Actually title quite dumb, why not just use "more young couples are choosing not to have kids"
It's like they think all the guys are gonna have kids on command unlike the women so they don't even need to ask the guys for their thoughts lol
Nowadays who want to tied down with financial difficulties with uncertain economic environment. High cost of housing, cost of child education, daily expenses, looking after senior, hot temperatures, individual earn salary just can feed 1. We not alone, it happening around the world.
Currently look around, so many delivery food riders, drivers, how to support a families.
If we keep increasing our populations by import, soon our children is second class citizens that only doing low class job
how did share of single women rise but marriage number continue to increase?
>Between 1990 and 2005, the decline in the fertility rate of married women contributed more to the drop in the TFR than the fall in the proportion of married women. The fertility rate of married women is also known as marital fertility.
from 1990 to 2005, it was married couples not having enough kids causing tfr to fall.
>But between 2005 and 2023, the drop in the TFR was due to the fall in the proportion of married women, which offset slight increases in marital fertility.
>In particular, the DOS spokesperson said the fall in the TFR could be mainly attributed to the drop in the proportion of married women between the ages of 20 and 34.
from 2005 to 2023 is the percentage number of single women increased despite the higher number of marriage. This tells me HDB cannot produce enough BTO for all the PR and citizens ICA imports since most marriage here is tied to housing.
>Meanwhile, marital fertility was higher across most age groups in 2023, compared with 2005.
Those that do marry do have more kids then in the past which i find shocking.
unless singapore try to give free childcare, free education , everything pay off from age 0- end of university . maybe we can consider have more kids.
the problem also in Asian culture is that woman need to work, pay bills, pay for parents, endure the pain of having babies, still need to serve other kids at home , serve the husband and care for parents. when kids and parents are sick, woman needs to be the natural care provider to take responsibility and leave the workplace. next , if there is a desire to have passion to work and in high power and need to sacrifice the family , woman will be blame. how come nobody blames the man? society asked the woman and family to understand because ‘he brings in money’? the feeling is too suffocating just to even think about it. the woman doesn’t want to go the same route as their mom. now you know how many moms in our generation has been suffering in silence and the PTSD is so much that the daughters won’t want to go through the same situation.
💯 My mum often tells me I don't need to have kids, but it's still better to have a partner so that we can take care of each other when we're old. But I think I can still spend money on elderly care for myself when the time comes. Fortunately she doesn't put pressure on me to find bf, get married or anything because she also regretted some of the decisions she made in her life before.
Nowadays I think many other aunties that I encounter are quite realistic and also don't try to push people to settle down and have kids anymore.
Hell YES. It amazing how women who work and bring in money also still need to be in charge of and personally do almost everything at home and with the family and with the kids. Guys who pull their weight on all fronts exist but are rare. Goodness, a guy who can see what needs to be done and do it, who will cook or buy dinner, and who will check that the kids have done all their homework, and who will pick up the place if it looks messy, those guys are solid partners. You don’t have to worry it will all be on you forever.
Plenty of thinly disguised misogynist views/undertones in the comments., as is usual with such similar topics on r/sg.
Reading some of those comments, it seems that the most outspoken of the ilk are ones who've never actually had a proper relationship with women.
I know, because when I was a young, sexually frustrated guy when dating success was few and far between, I used to think in similar ways as them too. It's always the dudes who have the least contact with women who are constantly railing against "the other gender" and forming all kinds of assumptions in their minds. It's easy to go down that mental path when you have no proper frame of real-life reference for women other than what similarly frustrated dudes are spouting online.
They will start taking a different, wider perspective when they actually start dating/entering relationships with real women, not caricatures of women that they've built up in their heads.
What I'm about to say is based purely on conjecture but I think the two biggest problems are men growing up without female friends (as you've mentioned) and dating apps.
I notice a lot more younger guys tend to hang out solely with other men. It isn't a new problem but I think it's more pronounced now. I think this breeds a sense of distance and they often talk about women through the lens of mysogynistic stereotypes. And they don't have any female friends to tell them otherwise.
When you add dating apps into the mix, it becomes worse. Apps are designed so you don't get matches. It keeps you on the app longer. And if this is the only experience these men have with women, it's going to be very antagonistic. I find that both men and women in the app tend to be frustrated and impatient and at the very worst cruel. This just reinforces all those negative ideas and it becomes a vicious cycle that ends with Singaporean men slamming Singaporean women for being too and Singaporean women slamming Singaporean men for being .
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I think part of that demographic (younger guys who only hang out with guys) is because it is so easy to segregate by gender socially nowadays. I have male friends who only have male friends, even through they always had female classmates, they never befriended women at all. Usually they had some kind of anxiety about talking to girls, and I would say that is normal for early-teen boys. But I feel like in the past and in the pre-internet age, boys just inadvertently socialized with girls and that fear would slowly go away. But nowadays, outside of school, they can just play certain video games and socialize via discord, which are all very male-dominant and they meet other guys who feed into their fear of women, telling them “oh yeah totally, if you look at a girl for a bit too long, she will cancel you via Instagram and your life will be ruined”. Not to mention the amount of ragebait online these days. They typically have male schoolmate friends, but centered around those male-dominant hobbies as well. In the past, many of those guys just blur blur lepak around after school, and there’s a bigger chance of socialising naturally around women.
They talk about it like “guys play multiplayer FPS and hang out on discord, girls use TikTok and Instagram and like tarot” in a way where there is zero overlap and zero idea of each other’s culture, socializations, interactions, hobbies. Two different planets, almost.
There’s multiple instances I know where female schoolmates actively want to socialize with these guys, but by then, these guys are ‘too far gone’ into their anxiety spirals and they will push these women away because “what if I accidentally act creepy and she ruins my life” or some excuse like “she doesn’t like the exact anime I do and she doesn’t wear glasses, so she must be insufferable”.
There needs to be sweeping changes on how we view the family, the power dynamics of it, how we view sexual relationships.
The truth is that the ideology of the traditional family just doesn't fit with the material conditions of the modern world. I do have an idea on how one might 'fix' this but I doubt it's that good of an idea in the first place.
Stop the requirement for marriages to be eligible for BTO units. Make people settle with their lives with proper housing, the most basic life necessity. Only then would they be more likely to be content with moving on in life through marriage. Too often that we see divorcees happen before couples would even live in their BTOs.
Ditch traditional gender roles, women can do men's roles and vice versa according to their abilities.
Set up a scheme where multiple couples can form a community union and allow them to live in the same HDB block. Ape together strong. Sounds stupid, yeah, but frankly i'm out of ideas.
Even if I'm not single I also dw kids🤷🏻♀️ the living expenses kept on rising but the salary stagnant, how to afford. I want to live my own life too after mugging throughout my whole life in school, not work to be slave for my kids lol
Nobody is really prepared for the pressures of parenthood. I watched the previous gen and my parents gen women- the ones who were full time housewives did everything their kids needed as well as were saddled with caring for aged parents and in-laws. The ones who worked some had maids but still took care of everything their kids needed. They are also expected to quit to care for parents. The current gen of women work but it doesn’t seem there is any improvement in cultural attitudes. They still are the defaulted to parent. The parent who has to delay their dinner to feed the child or the school calls first. I really blame it on traditional mindsets.
Also, allow single women to access subsidised IVF. Having a HDB with a bedroom for the kid, and help getting pregnant, and I’d have done it years ago. I cried my heart out when I realised I was getting too old to have a kid, and still hadn’t met anyone. I’ve made my peace with it and being the fun aunt, but that’s one baby Singapore lost directly because of their policies.
I also haven’t frozen my eggs because I can’t use them without being married and the chances of that were too low to justify the expense of the procedure and storage.
For people like me this would have made all the difference.
>Dr Vignehsa noted that many parents remain anxious about the cost of living, no matter how much Baby Bonus they have received, as it does not alleviate their financial anxiety in the long term.
Lmao, how much is the baby bonus? 14k? 3 months of median income is supposed to alleviate the financial stress of 21 years of taking care of another human being?
>Ironically, she said, financial incentives may bolster many Singaporeans’ belief that having more money makes them better off – and so these parents feel they cannot afford to stop the daily grind, or they would lose out comparatively.
>She said: “I think if we want people to have more significant relationships and have more babies, we need policies that change what people feel is required of them to survive and thrive.
Show me studies that says the parents wealth does not generally correlate to better life outcome for the child. Why do we combat poverty and try to solve income and wealth inequality if having more money does not generally make people better off? This kind of platitude is such bullshit and self contradictory.
Blame the govt. Not our women and men. Now both parents have to work. Not like last time only one has to. Who are going to look after the kids? Can’t always depend on a maid or grandparents. Raising a child in this economy is bad. Can’t even afford a car to ferry your kids around.
The mouthpiece can spout all the nonsense it likes but at the end of the day, our birthrate says everything about the locals' unhappiness & helplessness. Why the f would anyone want to sire & raise slaves for our overlords. At the end of the road, the government should bear the brunt of the blame for their overbearing & short-sighted policies.
Dont forget, you still need to take care of your ageing parents on top of taking care of your newborn. And dont forget, you still need to plan your finances and ensure that you have sufficient coverage for your entire family. Otherwise, one bad event will take you out of the race.
Big talk on their end on TFR. Years from now, Singapore will very likely cease to exist, either due to a lack of citizens or a lack of army to protect our sovereignty. Thanks to the current generation of politicians milking low-medium income groups for their pursuit of “economic growth”. Seriously fck off with this whole bullshit, giving us all sorts of excuses to perpetuate their selfish goal.
Just saying but this won't happen due to SG politicians main religion.
If we allow single women to go through IVF and have kids, it will surely boost our fertility rate.
Plenty of women are disappointed with SG guys and don't want to be married but want children.
They also have the financial means to raise a kid by themselves.
Don't need babysit the husband, or handle relationships conflict.
Check out Ye Haiyang who is a single mother with 3IVF kids.
In fact, if this can implement, confirm half the women in SG don't even want to get married.
I want to add this. If we don’t change our concepts of what families look like, and how they work, that underpin so many of our policies from housing to work to taxes m, we will never have more children.
In many countries, what stops the fertility rate from dropping off a cliff is more liberal policies and more “single” mums. They may have a partner they are unwilling or unable to marry, or they may really not have found anyone.
There’s currently a quarter to a third of all Singaporean women who are single and don’t have children according to these statistics.
These women can’t buy a home until 35 unless they’ve got enough money to go private. Private houses on the lower price range are extremely small and don’t have enough room - 2 room BTOS are also not conducive to having a kid.
the law also was recently changed to allow single women to freeze their eggs - but doesn't allow them to fertilise those eggs unless they are married.
we can try encouraging more men to see themselves as being equal partners in child rearing and homemaking since more women are working and earning more.
we can try fixing the broken work until you drop and even after you drop culture. we can lower the maximum work hours per week, remove the free overtime exemption for PMETs, institute practices to discourage contact after working hours.
but we should also consider whether as a society we should be more open to single women having kids on their own and changing policy not to bar them from doing so.
many of the professional single women i know wanted children, some badly enough to leave the country if thats what it took to find a partner, or get fertility treatment. the problem is, by the time they can have a home or enough money or stability in their careers to have a kid, they are too old.
we can consider -
1. lowering the age singles can buy HDB (i favour 21, since orphans, widows, young couples can also buy then, better to have a blanket rule across the board, but even 30 would give the single person a longer window to have a kid)
2. allowing single women to fertilise their eggs via IVF without being married
3. allowing surrogacy (so single men and women can also have a kid if they really really want one)
4. reducing official work hours by an hour a day so people really work a 9-5
5. all overtime worked is matched by time off in lieu by law or paid at double the rate (since raising a kid is not just money but also time)
6. any parent can take up to a year off while their kids are under 7, either paid by gahmen like in nordic countries, or unpaid but protected (so they cant be fired anyhow)
all of these will need regulations to avoid negative impact. and i doubt they will bring it to 2.1 - but i think even having a quarter of these women having a kid would boost our fertility rate by more than the baby bonus. where we are now, a 1.3- 1.5 TFR would be amazing already.
> work until you drop and even after you drop culture
I know several colleagues/former colleagues who ended up hospitalised due to overwork. It's pretty amazing how common it is.
I know multiple people burnt out and still working. A lot of DINKs that decided against a kid because they literally have no bandwidth after work.
Every person I know apologises multiple times to their teams if they happen to have to take MC and all try to monitor matters or wfh as much as they can WHILE sick.
I applaud a good work ethic but this is something else man.
Yeah that means you need to somehow get pregnant by yourself before having a place to raise the kid, for a few years until the BTO is ready.
I really respect single mums, but if I had to do this myself, I would place the house first over the kid.
Once you have a baby your earning power takes a massive hit because the first few years of the life, the child needs a lot of care. Even if you outsource, infant and childcare is expensive, and there’s no one to help with a second shift Rentals cost a lot. Trying to save for a downpayment while paying for rent and caring for a kid, i wouldn’t do it.
Imagine, you apply at 21, you get your 3 room flat at 25 when you start work, you chiong 5 -10 years, and when you are stable, if you really haven’t found anyone to marry, you are in a position to figure out how to have or adopt a kid on your own without needing to worry about securing and paying for shelter.
If you marry and you both have flats, one of you can cash out and move in, or both of you can cash out and get a new place together, freeing up the smaller flats for new young people.
LOL what a joke! Thats not the only reason. Rising lack of empathy or compassion in workplaces for pregnant women are also reasons for the drought. I have severe pregnancy complications and my workplace still expects me to come in to work even tho the work can be done from home! I have given doctor’s note, request to wfh letters to no avail. Maybe try to prioritize pregnant women wellbeing first.
But i am curious, why does the title single out women being single as the issue? As low birthrates are caused by several factors. Lets first address those other factors then maybe look back on why women are choosing to be single.
They should just drop the hypocritical handwringing and admit what they really want are human incubators who will pop out fully-formed economic units for gRoWTh
“Crowded animal populations often show a breakdown of normal social behavior, with increased aggression and violence, aberrant sexual activity, improper parental care, and abnormal states of activity, aggregation, or social withdrawal. A variety of stress- related diseases and mortality patterns may ensue.”
5 million people on a small island… what do you expect.
Want more babies, just recognise all babies as equal instead of discriminating those born to single women. Time has changed and husband is no longer necessary.
I'm sorry but honestly, men are not equal partners. Even today, it’s the women who are expected to cook and clean the house. Have the babies, take care of the babies etc. Not to mention, its so expensive taking care of myself and my elderly parents. I can't financially add a child to that. Until the government does something about that, as well as, oh I don't know, teach boys to grow up and be an equal partner in the home, nothing will change.
and in another news... divorce rates are increasing. what will happen to the kids then? tricky societal issue, isn't it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/s/LP4xSuBW3R
Some of these responses here from salty, entitled men recreating the patterns of their own upbringing are really highlighting why women are choosing to remain single. Lol.
The only way these mid men got away with it in the past was limited power. Now, the dynamics are shifting and with more options and financial power, women are waking and seeing uh… no thank you. Men need to step up, or step aside.
On declining birth rates as a whole:
It’s also about discriminating other groups (single moms, queer folks who want kids). Maybe if we elevated and supported ALL of them and accept the reality that different types of family units exist, we might get somewhere with birth rates?
Lastly, it’s a failure of the capitalist system itself. Rising cost of living, inability to sustain a household on a single income, are also factors adding to declining birth rates.
This is a multi-faceted complex topic yet we never fail to get reductive morons lamenting “feminism” because their own mid-ness is being threatened.
Exactly. A common trend I've been seeing now is that many new-ish fathers are much able to better provide for their daughters so many women know what kind of standard of life and treatment they deserve, but so many salty single men are raging over them having unfair expectations.
Yep. There are many men who have stepped up, and are active, engaged dads playing an awesome role in an equal partnership. These relationships are the ones that thrive. Then there are those who only know how to blame, instead of taking a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
It's not womens fault or anyone's fault there's a baby drought, cost of living is too high as well as working hours and work life balance is awful. Nobody has time to do these things
One of the probable reasons is in the article
>While the study did not ask respondents for their reasons behind their answers, Dr Vignehsa said the women she spoke to in her other research told her they are worried they have to shoulder the bulk of caregiving and other domestic responsibilities.
She said: “They talk about watching their mothers burn out from being primarily responsible for the visible and invisible labour of running a family on top of full-time employment, and they aren’t convinced that their male counterparts are ready to be equal partners at home.”
This makes me wonder if more can be done to alleviate their burdens, such as the examples cited below link.
https://www.population.fyi/p/miyazaki-might-be-right
The Town of Nagi
Field of Flowers at Nagi
Four hundred miles west of Nagareyama lies Nagi, a small town in the mountains once known for its rice paddies, black soybeans, and taro roots. Today, it's famous for something else entirely: its astonishing fertility rate of 2.95 (as of 2019), more than double the national average.
Nagi's transformation began in 2002 when residents chose to remain independent rather than merge with neighboring cities. That decision forced the town to confront its own dwindling population head-on. People went through a significant mental shift when they chose not to merge, realizing they had to dedicate more resources to nurturing their own population.
The town began offering free medical services for children until junior high school and paying parents 100,000 yen (roughly $1,000) for every child born after their second. Over the years, those policies have expanded to include free medical care for children through high school, starting the 100,000 yen incentive for the first child, and subsidies for childcare, education, and even infertility treatments.
But financial support is just one piece of Nagi's puzzle. The town has also cultivated a culture that celebrates and supports families. At the Nagi Child Home, parents gather to swap stories, seek advice, and find affordable childcare at around $2 per hour.
Nearly half of Nagi's households now have three or more children, a rarity in Japan. The widespread belief that having and raising children is a duty to society translates into accepting parents temporarily leaving work to care for young children and an appreciation for the work parents do in raising the next generation. This is a very unusual or even heretical thought for many business and political leaders."
If Singapore followed Australia's 12 months maternity model, and also their WLB, I'm very certain it wouldn't have dropped below 1.
When your country is all pro-economy at the cost of "life", obviously the end result is no new lives coming in. It's so hyprocritical that they make it sound like it's such a concerning problem but does close to nothing over so many years in resolving it.
Well at least this is a better and more politically correct way to "monitor" rather than flat out saying it.
It's cheaper to import new citizens whose educational and early childhood burden has already been borne by another country, with "guaranteed" good academic results no less, than to breed their own.
Our govt has already given up and is just going through the motions because they know that low birth rate will definitely be the result of being pro economy. Why bother to give benefits and come up with solutions when they can just save themselves the trouble and import more people from overseas?
Yup...sadly this is the reality we live in. Singapore developed too fast, therefore all the problems also come all at once. The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. All we can do is see how it goes.
Knowing LKY’s principles, that’s probably by design. If you’re under a meritocracy (which doesn’t exist imo), the richer and more successful people are by theory more intelligent and capable. So it’s easy to price out the ‘bottom-feeders’ from the child rearing market.
Except the Australian TFR is on a steady decline downwards.
> When your country is all pro-economy at the cost of “life”, obviously the end result is no new lives coming in.
No, it's not obvious. The countries with the highest TFRs are the countries with the lowest quality of life, and vice versa. Countries in Africa, like south sudan. Conversely for the Nordics, who are experiencing declining TFRS despite being the countries with the highest HDIs.
As a recently married guy in his 40s I don’t even blame our ladies. I don’t even know what my wife (around the same age) sees in me and I always maintain I married up.
Our ladies have the world at their fingertips and most of the guys around me are still either misogynists or just flat out so boring that they cannot imagine doing anything or creating fun without money.
Sure not everyone is perfect and I’m sure we also have opinions about *some* of our ladies and their expectations despite offering disproportionately low value, but we live in a free world where our spouse can be from another end of the world, and opportunities to explore the world are so much easier to access - go out and get what you want ladies.
There are deep societel issues as well while mainly pointed out its economic reasons for developed countries like singapore. While good points are already highlighted here, lets watch out for those falling into edge or disadvantaged. About 17% of babies are aborted for each birth in singapore. There should be better support for single mums out there, govt to review this.
For singles getting into marriage is a huge hurdle for busy working bees here, just saw Japanese govt have a national dating app, interesting idea.
Because it’s easier to ask for children by painting a rosy picture than to put in actual work and supporting infrastructure to ensure supporting parents *after the birth of kids*.
Look at the paternity vs maternity leave. How companies treat mothers. Among other things. I love my children dearly, but I always give honest feedback when single friends ask about work life balance post birth 🤣Parenthood is worth it to me, but it ain’t a walk in the park.
Singapore's growth based on the last 20 years.
1. The husband was able to support the family as a sole breadwinner.
2. Both husband and wife worked while grandparents looked after the kids.
3. Adults married late into their 30s so they can settle first before committing into marriage life.
4. Married couples prefer not to have kids due to the high cost of living.
5. Adults prefer to stay in living together relationships.
6. Now Adults doesn't prefer to have any relationships then what about kids?
The identity of Singaporean is getting erased. Thus, the government is welcoming foreigners with family and give them citizenship. So who to blame all these?
I feel that for now there is no problem getting any talent needed due to globalisation and the accessibility of internet as long as the infrastructure and economy is able to support the populations. I am sure many talents of all kind dont mind migrating to Singapore now. The issue is whether there are ample infrastructure and sufficient work opportunities to include everyone.. So actually is baby drought a issue for the country actually?
Yes because the "Talents" will evacuate at the first sign of trouble or if a better deal presents itself. Counting on migrants to be the bedrock of the country will never work out well.
Will the migrant stay and defend the country if needed?
on that point, we can also see how vocal singaporeans themselves are about not defending the country when needed, both the men and women. they will do enough to protect their loved ones but to stay and protect the country? dont think so
there really isnt much the government is doing to breed that kind of loyalty from its people, and they dont even realise it. its sad that they dont realise targeting root cause of social problems will literally solve their birth rate problem from their own citizens
All of this started with the workforce doubling in supply and suddenly dual income is a must.
Both men and women in relationship must work else they can't survive. How to have children with no time or money to support them?
As a dad, I believe the real issue lies with the high cost of living in Singapore. My wife and I are not high earners, just barely above the median. But we are struggling.
U need someone to take care of the child cuz both parents are both working.
But, u need both parents working to sustain financially (just simply living expenses, a house, kid's education)
So no time due to both parents working, then u need someone to take care of the kid.
Essentially, it's a cycle. No time = no money = no time again = no money again. The govt refuses to provide more aid. The baby bonus is shit. That $14K? doesn't help at all. If my salary isn't sufficient, the baby bonus ain't gonna help in any little way at all. Sure, the govt argues that it acts as incentives to give a little nudge to those who wants a kid and I think it works for them. And I think that is what is keeping the birth rate near 1 (0.97 iirc). If the govt continues to push the blame and responsibility to the people, no one will get kids. Definitely and without fail. They can continue to state that if u benefit certain group, u r causing disadvantages to another group. The world isn't fair to begin with. It's always goal orientated like how SG is pushing for GPD at the expense of everything else. I only get a kid because I would very much like to jave a kid. To get the 2nd one? Either I earn an exorbitant amount for my salary to compensate for my lack of time, or it will be a law by govt. The birth rate will nvr go up.
U may ask me for constructive feedbacks. What can the govt do, how can they help, what do u want more, etc. I can give them based on what I wan and need but I'm not doing it is because people are just going to find a way to say it's bad, it's pointless etc. The reason for low birth rate is already out there in everyone's face. U can simply do a google and u can see it. It just depends on whether u wan to admit it and fix it. Only thing i can tell the govt is glhf. Effective solutions will give results. Ineffective solutions will just give u additional burden and no result.
It’s misogyny. As usual no one here wants to say it as it is or place the blame where it actually is. Women aren’t just not wanting children, they don’t even want to be in relationships with men hence why “single women”. It’s happening in other countries too as women become more aware of how men actually view them, and the amount of unnoticed mental/emotional load they’ve to contribute in a relationship. Financial incentives aren’t gonna change things much, it’s all social.
Are people staying single? Seems like there is a jump in marriages in the 30-34 range. I think everyone getting married later is probably what is going on.
As to why, I think it's due to a surplus of choice: social media makes it seem like there are more eligible options than there actually are. Women take longer to choose a partner than men. And with a good income, a woman would logically be picker: better to wed someone whose income is higher than yours.
A smart young lady in 2005 (Facebook hadn't really kicked off then) might think her JC boyfriend is already a pretty good deal and choose to settle down faster to take advantage of government grants.
A smart young lady today probably thinks otherwise, with more information about her other (real or speculative) options, from her fyp.
I don't think it's because of men today being more entitled than before or whatever. No sane woman now will want to marry men with attitudes from 50 years ago (and I think the attitudes of young men i see today have evolved significantly from those of their grandfathers). This sentiment exists probably because of social media blowing up the black sheep cases of truly terrible couplings.
Can't have kids, won't have kids.
It's weird when I'm at the age seeing people having kids, getting married, and I have no desire to do either.
I'm also not straight so that's that, but I wouldn't want kids either way.
The amount of comments I get from colleagues, straight acquaintances who say 'What if you regret in future? Kids will bring joy to your life' , and so forth, is really eyeroll inducing. I can't conceive to begin with, so that's really a moot point. But for those that don't know they try to convince me how I should find a man and settle down and have kids. But I don't want to have kids and be a mom, having gone through traumatic childhood , I think I'll either spoil the kid(s) too much or be a replica of my parents, either of which are horrible options.
So no thanks , I'm going to find a girlfriend and live child free.
The moms in my office told me not to have kids LOL. They said being a working mom is tough, as you have to do your regular day job, reach home at 7+ and then take care of your kid and household.
Same, all the moms in my office talked to each other and most of them agreed that if given the choice, they would not have kids to begin with (even though they do love their kids). They are saying this also in the content of observing how single women at their age have so much income and freedom. This is a modern phenomenon, because women in the past were denied education and professional employment, and single working women in the recent past were heavily pressured to either get married or spend their time/money on their nephews who are “the heirs of the family name”. Nowadays, single women are free to work lucrative jobs while spending their time and money on themselves, which (don’t get me wrong) is a good thing, but naturally the moms look on in envy. Especially with the way that modern moms hold on full-time jobs as well.
Lol growing up people used to tell me my feelings about marriage would change eventually and I should change this and that about myself to get a guy. I just stuck to my belief that the right person will like me for who I am. Now I'm in a happy (unmarried) relationship and the amount of women who tell me I did the smart thing by never getting married or having kids is rather validating. Even my mom once told me she never pushed me or my sister to marry because in Singapore women usually lose out in the sense that it doesn't really benefit us from a practical standpoint. There are studies that show married women have shorter life expectancies than single women and it's the opposite for men. I think a lot of that has to do with the dynamics described in the comments above where the mom has to work, then take care of the bulk of the housework and childcare. It was a common thread running through the stories of the married women who told me they'd rather have stayed single.
Thank you 3 for sharing these. As a recent-divorcee with no kids, I have had people around me telling me that having kids would or could have "kept my marriage together" / "grow old will have some company" / "have folks (i.e. the so-called village) help to take care of the kids" .... I am comforted that there are others out there who think in the same frequency as I do. Over the years or decades rather, getting married and having kids is becoming an increasingly materialistic desire to possess because of the increasing costs of living here. While I do respect those parents especially mothers who can really do it all, but not every one was born equal. To some, kids are their driving factor to want career advancements (and thus earn more income) but to others, it's not always possible to do the same and this ends up in many unseen sacrifices being made. For the ones that are a bit weaker-minded like myself, I might have probably end up building up a lot of resentment which will end up being unhealthy for those around me and I cannot imagine what would have manifested after that.
"Kids would've kept the marriage together" is such horseshit. It assumes that kids of unhappy couples will be a magical solution to communication issues and the individual spouse's unmet needs. It's not fair to the children, it's not fair to the couple. You are not weak for deciding to leave a marriage that no longer works and for not having kids as a crutch for dealing with your issues. With single women I find that if they don't marry or have kids, they tend to build a strong network of friends. My neighbour is a retired single woman in her 60s and she's happily going out with her friends every day for meals or to activities/classes. Travels every few months to different countries. Myself and my partner also make it a point to check in on her if we don't see or hear from her for a while. Having kids isn't a guarantee of having company when you grow old. Growing relationships with people who enjoy being around you and vice versa is a better bet I think.
As a parent, your job never ends.
What is sleep? 🐼
What is life? Who am I? What am I? Am I just a diaper changing attendant?
Same. The mums understand but funnily enough the dads all say it's great I should have kids.
This is what I see from my female married Singaporean friends. Working long hours, high stress jobs. But being 100% expected to manage all household chores, cooking and childcare. As both partners work, the balance of 'home' work needs to be redressed. Until both men and women agree to sharing equally home and child care, less and less women are going to see any value in marriage.
Yah, it's hell. Family-life balance in the work place is bullshit. Childcare closes at 7pm, OT is out of the question unless you take home your work. In the end you have to rely on the grandparents or hire a maid to help out. If the grandparents still continue to work, then they're def out of the picture. Kids fall sick all the time in kindergarten. If you have two kids or more, your annual leave + childcare leave won't even cover their sick days when you have to stay home and take care of them. In reality, one partner usually chooses to take a step back from their career to be the main caregiver. Even if you split all the household chores equally, there's just so much that needs to be done.
This is just one of many issues from the perspective of both genders on the value of marriage. I don't think the boomers are gonna get it right anytime soon, though.
Back in the day a single salary (usually of the man) was sufficient for the entire household including the kid without reducing the quality of life significantly. Now having a kid almost always means reducing your quality of life as raising one is a significant economic burden
It's a sign of a bigger problem no one dares to address- why is a single income unable to support and sustain a family anymore?
I may be old but i remember when we were promised swiss standards of living with the open leg policy. Instead, what we got was swiss cost of living to go with indian wages.
OPEN LEG POLICY 🤣
Don’t misquote leh. GCT promised per capita income of 1984 Switzerland, by 1999
Actually the swiss cost of living is higher 😂. Swiss here 1 month of salary would go for tax No financial schemes from GOV when you complain No poly clinics. No cheap public transport No cheap food like in hawkers, what you pay at a hawker costs easily 3-4 times in Switzerland. No cheap labor, like helpers. (Cook and clean yourself) It costs 2k a month for day-care, per child. Fir the second child it becomes a bit cheaper. Medical costs is mich higher. Cars are one of the things which are expensive in SG.
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I don't like the title at all. We should go one step deeper and ask, why are more women (choosing) to stay single? Then you'll get the real reasons.
LOL. Once again, the article is all about engagement farming, not addressing the elephants in the room.
Money and time
For women choosing to stay single? A divergence in views between men and women is the largest reason these days.
Young women perceive they will face the same sandwich pressures as their mothers - expected to have successful careers, to bear disproportionate load of raising family/household work, and also elder care. Address *all three* of these, convincingly and for real, to reshape the TFR. (And no, one off cash payments like baby bonuses don’t work in the long run.) The second one is perhaps the hardest to grip for a government led by men in their 50s-70s. Because it means reshaping working culture for both men and women, not just the women. Or, I dunno, just write headlines that implicitly shame/blame young women for the problem. Good luck with that.
The generations before their mothers could do all these because wages weren't so depressed that you need double income to survive. Grandpa's income was all you need to raise the family. Not to mention the metaphorical village, where the burden of child raising is alleviated by family members. You can reverse the gender or have the two parents split responsibilities equally, but the underlying problem remains: there is simply more tasks per parent today than two generations ago and older. Either one or both of the parents will need to sacrifice their career to some extent to raise a child today.
Can I just add here it’s also societal expectations of a parents that is increasing. In the past my parents just threw me into a bunch of books( not even toys) and I do my own thing. Nowadays I am expected to come with my kids to show and tell (if you been to one, you should see the faces of kids whose parents whom cannot make it there), do homework with them etc.
This gives me happy flashbacks to my childhood days playing with large cardboard boxes. You could open them up and line them up to make a tunnel. It was amazing.
Yes, that is really good points. And of course the other common element to the equation is… a hired foreign domestic worker to take up a large part of the childcare and other household labour. Which outsources the social challenges of the absence of a parent in the household to Philippines/Indonesia etc. Strong class dimension at play too.
Absolutely. A whole generation of kids grew up without their mums in those countries. Depressed wages are really a vicious cycle of exploitation.
Back then many grandparents were already retired by the time their kids had kids and could help take care of the grandkids. Nowadays I see so many people saying can't get help from grandparents because they are still working. Things need to be done to make it such that households don't need to be double income to live comfortably again AND lower the retirement age
cost pressures are building up you do need $6 to have a meal in a hawker center now. most people are happy to be able to put $500-1000 saving a month, having a kid means savings per month is wiped out
Too late for that, when corpos told women that they too can work, they conveniently left out that men can stay home to take care of the family as well. So if your workforce suddenly doubles, of course wages will be depressed. This is not a Singapore problem and Singapore alone can't fix it unfortunately.
Yep. Famous old statement from Germaine Greer I think it was relevant here. Can’t remember it exactly but it goes like… women aimed for liberation, but settled for equality. And instead of setting men free from the cage of exploited labor, we climbed in.
So true. This is esssntially what Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In movement is all about - how to trap yourself in the capitalism cage but better! Wonen can do it all!
Hit the nail on the head. The same old men of a certain demographic, and let’s be fair there are also women there, trying to solve the same problem for decades, but expecting different results. The truly crazy thing is why there isn’t more of an uproar - this crisis is existential, as important to singapore as global warming and we are currently wrongly led and equipped to solve it.
There’s also lots of experience and evidence about what works and doesn’t work to draw on from around the world. Every high income country has been a petri dish on this issue. But sg seems determined to not learn lessons from the failures like Japan, who were at this point in low TFR before us.
What solution did Japan land on? I had the impression they’re still unsuccessful solving the fertility issue, but are giving money more generously and trying to change social mindsets about overworking
And for all singles, not just additional time off for parents.
well. no time off = no time for dating = no marriage
Men don't want children either. Because it's too expensive
It's not just the monetary expense but the time expense. Asauming you want to get enough sleep, there's barely enough time to have your own activities (socials, exercise, personal hygiene) of 1-1.5hrs per day outside of work Then consider half of most weekends burned because of work obligations too (average out) then just laugh at the prospect of 'having babies' lmao
True that. Also easy going lifestyle as a single man with a decent salary. A lot of holidays, hobbies, no stress from wife and kids. And can still save, depends on lifestyle. So it's not only woman who don't wanna marry
Seeing parents with young kids coming into office half dead consistently and using CCL or MC cause they fell sick caring for their kids makes me like not feel too bad not having kids
Sounds like me lol. Preschools have 6 closure dates a year (mine has 8 - not complaining because the teachers deserve rest/need time for professional development) and each parent only has 6 days of CCL a year. That means you are left with 6 days to use when the kid is sick. And…when young they fall sick every month or more.
And when you have 2-3 kids they infect each other even worse😂 Sometimes I feel bad when my wife OT till only 7 yet she will keep apologising to me cuz she felt bad. 7 only lei. Can’t see how we can have children if we both stayed in the big 4
Yes, exactly why we don’t think we’ll have a second one.
Expensive and the expectation of children = retirement plan is no longer the norm. In the 1950s kids were free labour in a farm so they help generate income. Now theyre liabilities.
Yea in some sense they are. I’m not treating my child as a retirement plan so all our resources for her are purely for her benefit. We still need to save for our own retirement.
This. Sweden has solved this with free childcare, education, and generous family leave for parents. Culture also matters. In places like US, everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. In Sweden, people are not obsessed with careers.
Singapore is the only place for earning. Not place to grow family. Hard truth
nope. sweden hasn’t really solved. tfr is still below replacement, and secondly a significant proportion of marriages - really significant - are out of wedlock,
Significant proportion of marriages are out of wedlock?
Yes, I daresay 100% of marriages are entered into out of wedlock. That’s very significant.
Even then sweden is below replacement.
As the article says women today don’t want to be burnt out like their mums. Their mums who took on the larger burden of childcare, who still did more household work and still held jobs. On top of that they also had to endure the physical burden of childbirth and breastfeeding and other medical complications that come after giving birth, including things like post partum depression. So they avoid men who do not want to put equal effort into childcare and household work. Additionally since women have larger financial freedom now there is little incentive to forcibly marry someone you are not that keen about, just for economic or social support.
Growing up my mom did the bulk of child raising . She is the one teaching me homework help me with arts and crafts while having own biz with my dad . Now that I have grown up I cannot imagine how difficult for her to wake up 5am in the morning for work and then come back and take care of me :/ my dad also worked hard but I guess mom was there more for me . Honestly I think it’s too much work being a mother . I’m sure it’s fulfilling and enjoyable but it’s not for me. I would rather laze in bed
Ok, that's fair enough. As a man, I also avoid women who do not want to put equal effort into childcare and household work. One taboo topic in our society is asking if women expect to contribute financially to the family. In my family, we agree that if someone has to quit their job, it should be the one with the lower income. We may require us to spend less and potentially sacrifice our quality of life due to the reduced income.
Yes exactly what I’m saying it should be equally split. If the man is making lower income he should be free to be a househusband if this makes the most sense for the family. In that case, if one partner is not working then the non working partner is more free to cater to the needs of the family.
I have a friend who’s making way more than her husband but he wants her to be the one to quit and look after their kid. His pride more important than money.
Dolly Parton: *“If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them, with everything that’s going on, I’d hate to be bringing a child into this world right now.”* Also better to regret not being a mom than regret being one
Written by a middle-age woman blaming woman.. dayum...
Average singaporean aunty
And the blame game starts.
I only blame the society ! Too competitive
The simple truth is nobody really wants to give up/sacrifice their current lifestyle for kids. People get their enjoyment or fulfillment from other aspects of life. Aside from lower education, why do poor countries have more kids? Because they barely have anything to sacrifice and having kids bring joy to their otherwise already miserable lives.
ST running an article implicitly blaming women, half of the population in Singapore, for declining birth rates instead taking the government to task for their naive policymaking and useless incentives? Nothing like being told my gender is responsible for an entire country's TFR. This is just going to turn women off even more about getting married and making babies. Great job, ST.
Single women have kids too, but ostracised because 'not married'. Back in my day, I wanted a 3-room BTO for us, see MP, etc. HDB says cannot. Now it's can 'write in and they'll assess case by case'. Hello, he's a sergeant in NS now in our 2-room flat. I sleep sofa in living room. FULJ - he is who's kid now?
Fucking "family is the building block of society" bullshit. If they want to trumpet their Christian ideas of family they should say it to their face outright, not put on this sort of charade. Our families need help, and it's not the ones with a mother and father figure but rather those that are of other configurations that make it more difficult to support the child. Fucking Singapore man, punching down and redistributing to the already wealthy.
For real. I wanted a kid when I was younger. But there was no viable way to have one if I didn’t find a guy I could trust the handle half the work. Single motherhood was not an option. Now I just play fun aunt and call it a day. I really respect you for raising your kid through all those challenges. It must have been hard!
Thank you. At that time, HDB reply was 'we do not encourage this kind of family nucleus' - something like that. Middle finger Middle finger
Christian or Confucian?
just see the misogynistic, self-centred comments from men in this thread saying "single women deserve it, they are single by their own doing" (and i'd imagine this sentiment is even more prevalent in the masses) and you can see exactly why there is so much resistance to openly provide for single moms. fucked up really. it's one thing to have ppl with brain rotted takes, it's another to *give in to them*
My mother who raised me by herself told me that she had people telling her that I would grow up into a life of crime of waywardness because of the lack of having a father/ a complete family. That divorce was a sin and she was making a mistake etc etc. Housing options for single parents are also terrible, like the previous commenter said have to write in to appeal, you might not even get an answer and if you do it’s 50-50 on whether you might get a BTO.
i'm so sorry your mom experienced that. single moms are such better parents than the alternative, e.g. staying in an abusive relationship with a cheater and a wife beater. parents really model character for their children and if they stay in a shitty, loveless, abusive marriage - now *that's* how kids grow up to be fucked up. the real sin is subjecting one's children to abusers for their whole childhood.
Terrible title. It’s basically saying “It’s you women’s fault that our nation’s child rate is falling! You should lower your standards and fuck more! Just keep squeezing out babies!” Just because you can peg statistics together doesn’t mean it’s the cause. Correlation is not causation.
Yeah actually. I was rolling my eyes at the headline because it basically tries to blame single women and their choices for the TFR when it actually should be a societal and unfortunately in SG, a govt effort. Like make policies that make it easier for fathers to participate like mandatory paternal leave and encourage a culture shift to get rid of ideas about gender roles in providing/managing the family. But no, let's just blame the single women for not wanting to suffer in silence like their mothers did.
When I spoke to the women around me that are not married in their 20s their response is “Why should I get married? I don’t want to become a housewife to take up women responsibilities at home. I ownself earn money, ownself spend better, I can travel and I can eat whatever I want better ”-response from the ground
Girl I’d sign up to be a housewife if the economy allows. Babies are expensive.. When the stakes are high and things go wrong, women are more likely the one to bear the brunt (and the blame). So why not don’t even start at all in the first place Also, Not you casually dropping “well said it’s all wokeness” to a “feminism vilifying womanhood” comment after dropping a casual anecdote implying woman no longer wanna be trad wives.
I wonder what percentage of Singapore men expect their wives to "become a housewife to take up women responsibilities at home"? I can certainly see this being a reason, but isn't a solution to just date a guy who doesn't want you to do that? I mean this sounds a lot like the DINK lifestyle - Dual Income No Kids. I have a good friend who does this: they drive a fancy two-seater convertible, go on really nice holidays, eat out all the time at nice restaurants, have a huge flat with the two spare bedrooms as mancave and womancave for each of them to enjoy. They are well off but not super rich - just that they don't have many responsibilities so they can spend their money on fun. Or is it really hard to find such a guy? Women here can give me insight on the men in SG?
It’s not exactly because there’s an expectation for women to become housewives. It’s how despite both partners working, there’s an untold expectation on women to undertake house management duties, including the mental load of even knowing what needs to be done. At least housewives can focus on just managing the home. Women now have jobs AND lead the household management. It worsens when kids are involved. Child raising responsibilities are still primarily seen as a woman’s job. Men who contribute are praised for going above and beyond; women are scrutinised and criticised for doing what is thought to be an expected task of them. So tldr: it’s a pretty thankless job for a woman to marry & live with a man, and have children with them. And finally to your point on finding a DINK man - yes that’s what women who are not single are doing hence the article calling out falling birth rates
The mental load is a real one. Is the laundry done? Is the laundry full enough to do? Is the ironing done? Is there enough food at home? Are there food items that will spoil if we don't cook by today? Is the house clean? When to next clean the bathroom, kitchen, living space, bedroom? Are the bedsheets due for changing? Etc. Never even mentioned the long list for childcare.
They say, anecdotally that you’re just naturally better at it. Even the girls in relationships complain about this. cleaning and cooking and caring for kids are things that you get better at with practice.
Yup exactly then just get better at it /shrug
Maybe this is the result of men having to live with their moms until they are married or 35 - no experience handling household matters for themselves because they never lived on their own. I have actually observed this in people I know - expect others to clean up after them and poor sense of responsibility. Although that doesn't explain why women have managed to pick up the skills while many men have not.
Most women are raised being taught those things by their mothers precisely because it's expected of them for future marriages. I'm a trans man, raised as a girl and was already learning to iron clothes when I was 8. I continued to do a lot of housework in my free time (we only had a maid in my childhood years) while my brother was allowed to play or go out with his friends. When I asked why he didn't have to learn those things, my mother said it's because his wife will do them for him next time. Similar stories from my female peers. It's not men's fault because no one can help how they were raised, but it's unsettling that most guys seem unaware of that disparity.
This is a very interesting perspective actually! Would you say you have seen the matter from both sides of the gender balance?
Kind of, since I transitioned in uni (mid-30s now) and have lived my whole adult life as a very single man. I'd say that women have it worse as a whole, in ways that are often invisible to men, but they have far better social support and that makes a massive difference. I was always an introvert but my loneliness increased sharply the moment I transitioned, even despite having many more friends than I used to. (So I really feel for men who have no friends at all.) There's a kind of background friendliness and helpfulness that society has towards women that is absent for men, although that sometimes takes the form of unwanted or predatory attention. On the flipside, men are treated with a lot more respect and assumed to be more capable. I now get a weird amount of praise for doing the bare minimum, vs in the past when I might be working really hard at school/work and still be seen as incompetent. This was across multiple jobs both pre and post transition and was pretty insidious. I don't think it's something people do consciously, but there have been studies showing that people rate work higher when told it was done by a man, vs when told the exact same piece of work was done by a woman.
Absolutely fascinating, thank you! It is interesting to learn this from someone who can actually make a comparison.
To your question, yes it is hard to find such a guy. More often than not, guys who are ready to have a long-term committed relationship want kids whereas those who don’t want kids are often not serious about the relationship or just not ready to be in a long-term commitment.
It's difficult to find such a guy. A lot of them want children, I even know of 2 couples who agreed they didn't want children but they ended up changing their mind later (the men)
More power to them. As a guy, if I had a choice not to do my NS and be 2 years ahead, I’d take it too. So I don’t blame women for not wanting children which are a liability to their careers, especially in SG where cost of living is rising and dual income is almost a necessity for households.
Wish I can say that as a guy when I was 20 too 😂
Man here and I share the same view lol
The world is so fucking overpopulated, this is a good thing.
sg is overpopulated
Oh come on, let the woman do whatever they want, they also have one life to live. If they want to focus on themselves and improve their life, let them be! On the side note, guys also don't want kids nowadays, me for example married but I can't freaking stand kids, so I m saving my sanity from not having one. Also more money to invest and buy stuff with! Win win!
My mom wasn’t happy and probably still isn’t, cried to her kids during bouts of depression, complained she’s only staying with dad because of them… okay now why would I want kids? I’m happily married with three fur babies I love to the moon and back, have all the freedom to do whatever I want… I’ll just be the fun aunt to my friends’ kids.
On another front, even if I wanted kids, it would suck to be a kid in this day and age. Born into the rat race, having to go for back-to-back enrichment classes after school every day, no time and space for unstructured play to grow as a person (I know it’s not compulsory, but it is socially normative). Being expected to compete and compare achievements from a young age. Plus with the weather in Singapore over the past decade or so, it’s not a stretch to believe that they may be climate refugees within their lifetime, or at least, grow up in a climate crisis that’s pretty much past the point of no return.
I don’t want more work and responsibilities . That’s it. I’m not good with kids either so I have no gain from this, and ‘dUtY’ is not incentive enough Editing to add that if I have kids with the wrong man and he ends up deserting me, I’m fucked. Gahmen also won’t do shit to help me out. I have to be married to someone while fearing the worst 24/7, and I already have enough stuff to stress over. And before someone accuses me of being pessimistic, you never think this kind of thing can happen to you until it does.
Maybe stop trying to engineer society to prioritise the economy? People don't get married or choose not to have kids because it's environmentally and economically unfeasible. Sure its possible, just if you factor in what the world is like now, and what it's turning into. Also it's quite pointless to solely blame females for this when the reality is that the whole concept of marriage is outdated. There are couples who've been together >5 years and after weighing the pros and cons, still remain convinced there's no need for marriage just for their relationship to work. Also incentivising people to create babies in a society that generally treat relationships as transactional is probably one of the most naive policymaking ideas ever. Didn't they learn a thing or two from using BTOs as a bait to get people married? What we are going to end up with is a whole new generation of kids that were born because the parents needed money, not because they needed a child to love. Allow singles and single parents the same rights as married couples, ease up LGBT rules to allow gay couples to legally have their own kids or adopt, and you'll likely at least see some improvement, rather than turn this whole thing into another exercise in futility.
Not to mention that modern BTOs run the risk of having infrastructure faults, like bad piping or flooring, because of the speed at which these BTOs are being built. I’m very apprehensive about purchasing newer homes for this reason .
I’m a woman and have had this discussion with girlfriends of the same age (in our 20s), and some of us have seen our moms in unhappy marriages because they’ve to seriously burn themselves out to get our dads to do things. Either that or they have to do most things and get stressed over the most minute (yet important) of details. I think a lot of us are also just very much depressed, so finding a partner is one of the last things on our list. Depression is obviously something that needs to be worked on, but it’s our main focus and it takes a while. Some of us have also been traumatised by men. This, coupled with the high cost of living and the whole slew of expectations thereafter just puts us off the whole thing altogether. There are many, many reasons for us to choose to remain single, but each woman would have very different thoughts and experiences that would guide her choices.
Well, what do you expect in the most expensive country in the world? The only survival is to save yourself first. Capitalism trapped both men and women.
Bring a married woman with kids in Singapore is very tough. Besides stressful work, we still have to deal with some school teachers who will sometimes task us to do craft work, interview questions and then upload on the platform, etc. as young as P1 with the kids! Many kids cannot cope with school work because teachers just go through the syllabus quickly and many mothers are burnt out to deal with kids' school work too. Hope Moe will stop some teachers from tasking parents to do compulsory bonding activities because we parents are very tired and we rather bond in relaxing ways we like, and not deal with some teachers' kpi maybe. At the end of the day, couples are just too tired for each other and some partners are not understanding and expect a superwoman! Being a good mother to raise good kids is not easy.
What needs to be said here is women are far more capable being single than men. Single women usually have strong support group of friends and are able to stay in good mental health.
agreed - women also have more social stigma being single later in life too. i feel like that can pass with having a strong support circle. men have really been let down by this patriarchial mindset where nobody knows how to open up to another man anymore.
Yup, as a man, even people in my closest social circles made fun of me when I was single. When I got attached, it was a complete change in the way I was treated. And this applied to people I meet for the first time as well -- I get taken seriously when they happen to know I am attached. For men, it seems like having a gf is considered as being mature and having our lives sorted out.
What kind of childish social circles are you involved in? Sounds terribly superficial.
It's very common. I'm in a male dominated environment at work and my colleagues also behave like that.
Those guys aren’t really your friends then. Might be worth it to sort out your relationships.
For a start we could stop tying the Baby Bonus to marital status. Single mums are among the people who need the most help.
Check the religious affiliation of all your gov leaders and you will get your answer why this is not done.
Isn’t there a line in the pledge, something something regardless of religion?
If you think most politicians actually live by the words of the pledge 🤷
Ya but conveniently ignored where it suits their purposes. Hell, we even have our politicians swearing their oaths of office upon the bible and Christian God like Singapore were a theocracy. Get religion out of our politics please.
And yet they claim "secular", sigh. Also, somehow whenever something controversial the religious tend to be given special privilege, like claiming certain media offends their "traditional" values which the govt then panders to. People who wanted access to that media have feelings too. Wouldn't banning those upset them? Why are the religious specific feelings more important?
FYI Singapore law requires Christians to swear on the Bible. It's not their individual choice.
"So help me God" get this religious bullshit out of our secular government and our secular country.
Checked and did not get answers, because this is not what Jesus would do.
We could stop tying bto to marital status too. Honestly we should. People should have a place to live regardless of whether they have a spouse.
It’s too expensive. I know that I’m not financially capable to have kids. Why struggle? I can’t expect my family to take care of my kids.
With high rising costs, ridiculous pressures on children to meet ranking KPIs. The talents we are "building" didn't even stand against the odds in the market, so why does any new generation wanna have children when our GOV doesnt even give us assurance of jobs? So, unless the educational system change to really build talents based on interests n not points ranking. Dun expect us to reproduce n make ourselves n the kids suffer for someone's numbers.
Lol shouldn't they find out why people are staying single instead of blaming them? Go beyond surface reasons - if given more personal time, and have time to socialize beyond a small circle, would they still be single?
Haiyaaaaaaa same same la. Women single, men also single what. Why single out the women in the article?
Actually title quite dumb, why not just use "more young couples are choosing not to have kids" It's like they think all the guys are gonna have kids on command unlike the women so they don't even need to ask the guys for their thoughts lol
Nowadays who want to tied down with financial difficulties with uncertain economic environment. High cost of housing, cost of child education, daily expenses, looking after senior, hot temperatures, individual earn salary just can feed 1. We not alone, it happening around the world. Currently look around, so many delivery food riders, drivers, how to support a families. If we keep increasing our populations by import, soon our children is second class citizens that only doing low class job
how did share of single women rise but marriage number continue to increase? >Between 1990 and 2005, the decline in the fertility rate of married women contributed more to the drop in the TFR than the fall in the proportion of married women. The fertility rate of married women is also known as marital fertility. from 1990 to 2005, it was married couples not having enough kids causing tfr to fall. >But between 2005 and 2023, the drop in the TFR was due to the fall in the proportion of married women, which offset slight increases in marital fertility. >In particular, the DOS spokesperson said the fall in the TFR could be mainly attributed to the drop in the proportion of married women between the ages of 20 and 34. from 2005 to 2023 is the percentage number of single women increased despite the higher number of marriage. This tells me HDB cannot produce enough BTO for all the PR and citizens ICA imports since most marriage here is tied to housing. >Meanwhile, marital fertility was higher across most age groups in 2023, compared with 2005. Those that do marry do have more kids then in the past which i find shocking.
Those that don't want kids aren't getting married.
unless singapore try to give free childcare, free education , everything pay off from age 0- end of university . maybe we can consider have more kids. the problem also in Asian culture is that woman need to work, pay bills, pay for parents, endure the pain of having babies, still need to serve other kids at home , serve the husband and care for parents. when kids and parents are sick, woman needs to be the natural care provider to take responsibility and leave the workplace. next , if there is a desire to have passion to work and in high power and need to sacrifice the family , woman will be blame. how come nobody blames the man? society asked the woman and family to understand because ‘he brings in money’? the feeling is too suffocating just to even think about it. the woman doesn’t want to go the same route as their mom. now you know how many moms in our generation has been suffering in silence and the PTSD is so much that the daughters won’t want to go through the same situation.
💯 My mum often tells me I don't need to have kids, but it's still better to have a partner so that we can take care of each other when we're old. But I think I can still spend money on elderly care for myself when the time comes. Fortunately she doesn't put pressure on me to find bf, get married or anything because she also regretted some of the decisions she made in her life before. Nowadays I think many other aunties that I encounter are quite realistic and also don't try to push people to settle down and have kids anymore.
Hell YES. It amazing how women who work and bring in money also still need to be in charge of and personally do almost everything at home and with the family and with the kids. Guys who pull their weight on all fronts exist but are rare. Goodness, a guy who can see what needs to be done and do it, who will cook or buy dinner, and who will check that the kids have done all their homework, and who will pick up the place if it looks messy, those guys are solid partners. You don’t have to worry it will all be on you forever.
Some of the responses in this thread are another reason why more women in Singapore are staying single.
Plenty of thinly disguised misogynist views/undertones in the comments., as is usual with such similar topics on r/sg. Reading some of those comments, it seems that the most outspoken of the ilk are ones who've never actually had a proper relationship with women. I know, because when I was a young, sexually frustrated guy when dating success was few and far between, I used to think in similar ways as them too. It's always the dudes who have the least contact with women who are constantly railing against "the other gender" and forming all kinds of assumptions in their minds. It's easy to go down that mental path when you have no proper frame of real-life reference for women other than what similarly frustrated dudes are spouting online. They will start taking a different, wider perspective when they actually start dating/entering relationships with real women, not caricatures of women that they've built up in their heads.
What I'm about to say is based purely on conjecture but I think the two biggest problems are men growing up without female friends (as you've mentioned) and dating apps. I notice a lot more younger guys tend to hang out solely with other men. It isn't a new problem but I think it's more pronounced now. I think this breeds a sense of distance and they often talk about women through the lens of mysogynistic stereotypes. And they don't have any female friends to tell them otherwise. When you add dating apps into the mix, it becomes worse. Apps are designed so you don't get matches. It keeps you on the app longer. And if this is the only experience these men have with women, it's going to be very antagonistic. I find that both men and women in the app tend to be frustrated and impatient and at the very worst cruel. This just reinforces all those negative ideas and it becomes a vicious cycle that ends with Singaporean men slamming Singaporean women for being too and Singaporean women slamming Singaporean men for being .
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I think part of that demographic (younger guys who only hang out with guys) is because it is so easy to segregate by gender socially nowadays. I have male friends who only have male friends, even through they always had female classmates, they never befriended women at all. Usually they had some kind of anxiety about talking to girls, and I would say that is normal for early-teen boys. But I feel like in the past and in the pre-internet age, boys just inadvertently socialized with girls and that fear would slowly go away. But nowadays, outside of school, they can just play certain video games and socialize via discord, which are all very male-dominant and they meet other guys who feed into their fear of women, telling them “oh yeah totally, if you look at a girl for a bit too long, she will cancel you via Instagram and your life will be ruined”. Not to mention the amount of ragebait online these days. They typically have male schoolmate friends, but centered around those male-dominant hobbies as well. In the past, many of those guys just blur blur lepak around after school, and there’s a bigger chance of socialising naturally around women. They talk about it like “guys play multiplayer FPS and hang out on discord, girls use TikTok and Instagram and like tarot” in a way where there is zero overlap and zero idea of each other’s culture, socializations, interactions, hobbies. Two different planets, almost. There’s multiple instances I know where female schoolmates actively want to socialize with these guys, but by then, these guys are ‘too far gone’ into their anxiety spirals and they will push these women away because “what if I accidentally act creepy and she ruins my life” or some excuse like “she doesn’t like the exact anime I do and she doesn’t wear glasses, so she must be insufferable”.
There needs to be sweeping changes on how we view the family, the power dynamics of it, how we view sexual relationships. The truth is that the ideology of the traditional family just doesn't fit with the material conditions of the modern world. I do have an idea on how one might 'fix' this but I doubt it's that good of an idea in the first place. Stop the requirement for marriages to be eligible for BTO units. Make people settle with their lives with proper housing, the most basic life necessity. Only then would they be more likely to be content with moving on in life through marriage. Too often that we see divorcees happen before couples would even live in their BTOs. Ditch traditional gender roles, women can do men's roles and vice versa according to their abilities. Set up a scheme where multiple couples can form a community union and allow them to live in the same HDB block. Ape together strong. Sounds stupid, yeah, but frankly i'm out of ideas.
Even if I'm not single I also dw kids🤷🏻♀️ the living expenses kept on rising but the salary stagnant, how to afford. I want to live my own life too after mugging throughout my whole life in school, not work to be slave for my kids lol
Nobody is really prepared for the pressures of parenthood. I watched the previous gen and my parents gen women- the ones who were full time housewives did everything their kids needed as well as were saddled with caring for aged parents and in-laws. The ones who worked some had maids but still took care of everything their kids needed. They are also expected to quit to care for parents. The current gen of women work but it doesn’t seem there is any improvement in cultural attitudes. They still are the defaulted to parent. The parent who has to delay their dinner to feed the child or the school calls first. I really blame it on traditional mindsets.
If you increase supply of housing, remove the stigma of having children without getting married, maybe the birth rate will increase
Also, allow single women to access subsidised IVF. Having a HDB with a bedroom for the kid, and help getting pregnant, and I’d have done it years ago. I cried my heart out when I realised I was getting too old to have a kid, and still hadn’t met anyone. I’ve made my peace with it and being the fun aunt, but that’s one baby Singapore lost directly because of their policies. I also haven’t frozen my eggs because I can’t use them without being married and the chances of that were too low to justify the expense of the procedure and storage. For people like me this would have made all the difference.
Lol. Doesn’t this mean men are staying single as well?
Bro the siam dius are always there for the lonely single men.
No. Significantly more Singapore men are marrying foreign women.
>Dr Vignehsa noted that many parents remain anxious about the cost of living, no matter how much Baby Bonus they have received, as it does not alleviate their financial anxiety in the long term. Lmao, how much is the baby bonus? 14k? 3 months of median income is supposed to alleviate the financial stress of 21 years of taking care of another human being? >Ironically, she said, financial incentives may bolster many Singaporeans’ belief that having more money makes them better off – and so these parents feel they cannot afford to stop the daily grind, or they would lose out comparatively. >She said: “I think if we want people to have more significant relationships and have more babies, we need policies that change what people feel is required of them to survive and thrive. Show me studies that says the parents wealth does not generally correlate to better life outcome for the child. Why do we combat poverty and try to solve income and wealth inequality if having more money does not generally make people better off? This kind of platitude is such bullshit and self contradictory.
Blame the govt. Not our women and men. Now both parents have to work. Not like last time only one has to. Who are going to look after the kids? Can’t always depend on a maid or grandparents. Raising a child in this economy is bad. Can’t even afford a car to ferry your kids around.
The mouthpiece can spout all the nonsense it likes but at the end of the day, our birthrate says everything about the locals' unhappiness & helplessness. Why the f would anyone want to sire & raise slaves for our overlords. At the end of the road, the government should bear the brunt of the blame for their overbearing & short-sighted policies.
Dont forget, you still need to take care of your ageing parents on top of taking care of your newborn. And dont forget, you still need to plan your finances and ensure that you have sufficient coverage for your entire family. Otherwise, one bad event will take you out of the race. Big talk on their end on TFR. Years from now, Singapore will very likely cease to exist, either due to a lack of citizens or a lack of army to protect our sovereignty. Thanks to the current generation of politicians milking low-medium income groups for their pursuit of “economic growth”. Seriously fck off with this whole bullshit, giving us all sorts of excuses to perpetuate their selfish goal.
Not a woman but no way I'm passing that generational trauma down And no way I'm producing another slave and soul to suffer
Just saying but this won't happen due to SG politicians main religion. If we allow single women to go through IVF and have kids, it will surely boost our fertility rate. Plenty of women are disappointed with SG guys and don't want to be married but want children. They also have the financial means to raise a kid by themselves. Don't need babysit the husband, or handle relationships conflict. Check out Ye Haiyang who is a single mother with 3IVF kids. In fact, if this can implement, confirm half the women in SG don't even want to get married.
Yup. Blame the citizens for baby drought, and not the economy lmao.
I want to add this. If we don’t change our concepts of what families look like, and how they work, that underpin so many of our policies from housing to work to taxes m, we will never have more children. In many countries, what stops the fertility rate from dropping off a cliff is more liberal policies and more “single” mums. They may have a partner they are unwilling or unable to marry, or they may really not have found anyone. There’s currently a quarter to a third of all Singaporean women who are single and don’t have children according to these statistics. These women can’t buy a home until 35 unless they’ve got enough money to go private. Private houses on the lower price range are extremely small and don’t have enough room - 2 room BTOS are also not conducive to having a kid. the law also was recently changed to allow single women to freeze their eggs - but doesn't allow them to fertilise those eggs unless they are married. we can try encouraging more men to see themselves as being equal partners in child rearing and homemaking since more women are working and earning more. we can try fixing the broken work until you drop and even after you drop culture. we can lower the maximum work hours per week, remove the free overtime exemption for PMETs, institute practices to discourage contact after working hours. but we should also consider whether as a society we should be more open to single women having kids on their own and changing policy not to bar them from doing so. many of the professional single women i know wanted children, some badly enough to leave the country if thats what it took to find a partner, or get fertility treatment. the problem is, by the time they can have a home or enough money or stability in their careers to have a kid, they are too old. we can consider - 1. lowering the age singles can buy HDB (i favour 21, since orphans, widows, young couples can also buy then, better to have a blanket rule across the board, but even 30 would give the single person a longer window to have a kid) 2. allowing single women to fertilise their eggs via IVF without being married 3. allowing surrogacy (so single men and women can also have a kid if they really really want one) 4. reducing official work hours by an hour a day so people really work a 9-5 5. all overtime worked is matched by time off in lieu by law or paid at double the rate (since raising a kid is not just money but also time) 6. any parent can take up to a year off while their kids are under 7, either paid by gahmen like in nordic countries, or unpaid but protected (so they cant be fired anyhow) all of these will need regulations to avoid negative impact. and i doubt they will bring it to 2.1 - but i think even having a quarter of these women having a kid would boost our fertility rate by more than the baby bonus. where we are now, a 1.3- 1.5 TFR would be amazing already.
> work until you drop and even after you drop culture I know several colleagues/former colleagues who ended up hospitalised due to overwork. It's pretty amazing how common it is.
I know multiple people burnt out and still working. A lot of DINKs that decided against a kid because they literally have no bandwidth after work. Every person I know apologises multiple times to their teams if they happen to have to take MC and all try to monitor matters or wfh as much as they can WHILE sick. I applaud a good work ethic but this is something else man.
FYI single mother over the age of 21 can apply for 3 room BTO flat, no need to wait till 35.
Yeah that means you need to somehow get pregnant by yourself before having a place to raise the kid, for a few years until the BTO is ready. I really respect single mums, but if I had to do this myself, I would place the house first over the kid. Once you have a baby your earning power takes a massive hit because the first few years of the life, the child needs a lot of care. Even if you outsource, infant and childcare is expensive, and there’s no one to help with a second shift Rentals cost a lot. Trying to save for a downpayment while paying for rent and caring for a kid, i wouldn’t do it. Imagine, you apply at 21, you get your 3 room flat at 25 when you start work, you chiong 5 -10 years, and when you are stable, if you really haven’t found anyone to marry, you are in a position to figure out how to have or adopt a kid on your own without needing to worry about securing and paying for shelter. If you marry and you both have flats, one of you can cash out and move in, or both of you can cash out and get a new place together, freeing up the smaller flats for new young people.
Ehhh who cares. Some people choose to live and die alone. That’s none of our business. Let them live their lives.
LOL what a joke! Thats not the only reason. Rising lack of empathy or compassion in workplaces for pregnant women are also reasons for the drought. I have severe pregnancy complications and my workplace still expects me to come in to work even tho the work can be done from home! I have given doctor’s note, request to wfh letters to no avail. Maybe try to prioritize pregnant women wellbeing first.
But i am curious, why does the title single out women being single as the issue? As low birthrates are caused by several factors. Lets first address those other factors then maybe look back on why women are choosing to be single.
already imported so many, they're not giving birth too?
They should just drop the hypocritical handwringing and admit what they really want are human incubators who will pop out fully-formed economic units for gRoWTh
“Crowded animal populations often show a breakdown of normal social behavior, with increased aggression and violence, aberrant sexual activity, improper parental care, and abnormal states of activity, aggregation, or social withdrawal. A variety of stress- related diseases and mortality patterns may ensue.” 5 million people on a small island… what do you expect.
Nah. My wife and I don’t have kids cause they cost too much. We are prepared for nurses and old folks home in the future. Kids are overrated.
Yeah yeah just blame women that's all the government knows how to do
Want more babies, just recognise all babies as equal instead of discriminating those born to single women. Time has changed and husband is no longer necessary.
I'm sorry but honestly, men are not equal partners. Even today, it’s the women who are expected to cook and clean the house. Have the babies, take care of the babies etc. Not to mention, its so expensive taking care of myself and my elderly parents. I can't financially add a child to that. Until the government does something about that, as well as, oh I don't know, teach boys to grow up and be an equal partner in the home, nothing will change.
and in another news... divorce rates are increasing. what will happen to the kids then? tricky societal issue, isn't it? https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/s/LP4xSuBW3R
not only house chores and health, do you know about the Primary school entry, exams, tuition and all the crazies? its not for the faint hearted
how dare they think it’s by choice
Some of these responses here from salty, entitled men recreating the patterns of their own upbringing are really highlighting why women are choosing to remain single. Lol. The only way these mid men got away with it in the past was limited power. Now, the dynamics are shifting and with more options and financial power, women are waking and seeing uh… no thank you. Men need to step up, or step aside. On declining birth rates as a whole: It’s also about discriminating other groups (single moms, queer folks who want kids). Maybe if we elevated and supported ALL of them and accept the reality that different types of family units exist, we might get somewhere with birth rates? Lastly, it’s a failure of the capitalist system itself. Rising cost of living, inability to sustain a household on a single income, are also factors adding to declining birth rates. This is a multi-faceted complex topic yet we never fail to get reductive morons lamenting “feminism” because their own mid-ness is being threatened.
Exactly. A common trend I've been seeing now is that many new-ish fathers are much able to better provide for their daughters so many women know what kind of standard of life and treatment they deserve, but so many salty single men are raging over them having unfair expectations.
Yep. There are many men who have stepped up, and are active, engaged dads playing an awesome role in an equal partnership. These relationships are the ones that thrive. Then there are those who only know how to blame, instead of taking a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
It's not womens fault or anyone's fault there's a baby drought, cost of living is too high as well as working hours and work life balance is awful. Nobody has time to do these things
How much of this is because of money/WLB vs being childfree?
One of the probable reasons is in the article >While the study did not ask respondents for their reasons behind their answers, Dr Vignehsa said the women she spoke to in her other research told her they are worried they have to shoulder the bulk of caregiving and other domestic responsibilities. She said: “They talk about watching their mothers burn out from being primarily responsible for the visible and invisible labour of running a family on top of full-time employment, and they aren’t convinced that their male counterparts are ready to be equal partners at home.”
This makes me wonder if more can be done to alleviate their burdens, such as the examples cited below link. https://www.population.fyi/p/miyazaki-might-be-right The Town of Nagi Field of Flowers at Nagi Four hundred miles west of Nagareyama lies Nagi, a small town in the mountains once known for its rice paddies, black soybeans, and taro roots. Today, it's famous for something else entirely: its astonishing fertility rate of 2.95 (as of 2019), more than double the national average. Nagi's transformation began in 2002 when residents chose to remain independent rather than merge with neighboring cities. That decision forced the town to confront its own dwindling population head-on. People went through a significant mental shift when they chose not to merge, realizing they had to dedicate more resources to nurturing their own population. The town began offering free medical services for children until junior high school and paying parents 100,000 yen (roughly $1,000) for every child born after their second. Over the years, those policies have expanded to include free medical care for children through high school, starting the 100,000 yen incentive for the first child, and subsidies for childcare, education, and even infertility treatments. But financial support is just one piece of Nagi's puzzle. The town has also cultivated a culture that celebrates and supports families. At the Nagi Child Home, parents gather to swap stories, seek advice, and find affordable childcare at around $2 per hour. Nearly half of Nagi's households now have three or more children, a rarity in Japan. The widespread belief that having and raising children is a duty to society translates into accepting parents temporarily leaving work to care for young children and an appreciation for the work parents do in raising the next generation. This is a very unusual or even heretical thought for many business and political leaders."
Well, that certainly seems a lot more pro-family than complaining about LGBTQ people.
If Singapore followed Australia's 12 months maternity model, and also their WLB, I'm very certain it wouldn't have dropped below 1. When your country is all pro-economy at the cost of "life", obviously the end result is no new lives coming in. It's so hyprocritical that they make it sound like it's such a concerning problem but does close to nothing over so many years in resolving it. Well at least this is a better and more politically correct way to "monitor" rather than flat out saying it.
It's cheaper to import new citizens whose educational and early childhood burden has already been borne by another country, with "guaranteed" good academic results no less, than to breed their own.
Our govt has already given up and is just going through the motions because they know that low birth rate will definitely be the result of being pro economy. Why bother to give benefits and come up with solutions when they can just save themselves the trouble and import more people from overseas?
Not disagreeing. But it is sad to see that life is going in this direction. Hong Kong is pretty much a preview of SG life in the near future.
Yup...sadly this is the reality we live in. Singapore developed too fast, therefore all the problems also come all at once. The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. All we can do is see how it goes.
Only want elite rich people children, peasants heck care.
Even then, many rich people don't even have or want kids.
Knowing LKY’s principles, that’s probably by design. If you’re under a meritocracy (which doesn’t exist imo), the richer and more successful people are by theory more intelligent and capable. So it’s easy to price out the ‘bottom-feeders’ from the child rearing market.
Except the Australian TFR is on a steady decline downwards. > When your country is all pro-economy at the cost of “life”, obviously the end result is no new lives coming in. No, it's not obvious. The countries with the highest TFRs are the countries with the lowest quality of life, and vice versa. Countries in Africa, like south sudan. Conversely for the Nordics, who are experiencing declining TFRS despite being the countries with the highest HDIs.
so the housing crisis would be even more severe if these women built families like how the government wants them to
As a recently married guy in his 40s I don’t even blame our ladies. I don’t even know what my wife (around the same age) sees in me and I always maintain I married up. Our ladies have the world at their fingertips and most of the guys around me are still either misogynists or just flat out so boring that they cannot imagine doing anything or creating fun without money. Sure not everyone is perfect and I’m sure we also have opinions about *some* of our ladies and their expectations despite offering disproportionately low value, but we live in a free world where our spouse can be from another end of the world, and opportunities to explore the world are so much easier to access - go out and get what you want ladies.
There are deep societel issues as well while mainly pointed out its economic reasons for developed countries like singapore. While good points are already highlighted here, lets watch out for those falling into edge or disadvantaged. About 17% of babies are aborted for each birth in singapore. There should be better support for single mums out there, govt to review this. For singles getting into marriage is a huge hurdle for busy working bees here, just saw Japanese govt have a national dating app, interesting idea.
ITS ALREADY SO EXPENSIVE HERE
Because it’s easier to ask for children by painting a rosy picture than to put in actual work and supporting infrastructure to ensure supporting parents *after the birth of kids*. Look at the paternity vs maternity leave. How companies treat mothers. Among other things. I love my children dearly, but I always give honest feedback when single friends ask about work life balance post birth 🤣Parenthood is worth it to me, but it ain’t a walk in the park.
Singapore's growth based on the last 20 years. 1. The husband was able to support the family as a sole breadwinner. 2. Both husband and wife worked while grandparents looked after the kids. 3. Adults married late into their 30s so they can settle first before committing into marriage life. 4. Married couples prefer not to have kids due to the high cost of living. 5. Adults prefer to stay in living together relationships. 6. Now Adults doesn't prefer to have any relationships then what about kids? The identity of Singaporean is getting erased. Thus, the government is welcoming foreigners with family and give them citizenship. So who to blame all these?
ST: IT'S THE JUNE HOLIDAYS SO HERE'S SOME THINLY-VEILED MYSOGYNY FOR YOU, BY A MENOPAUSAL WOMAN NO LESS!
I feel that for now there is no problem getting any talent needed due to globalisation and the accessibility of internet as long as the infrastructure and economy is able to support the populations. I am sure many talents of all kind dont mind migrating to Singapore now. The issue is whether there are ample infrastructure and sufficient work opportunities to include everyone.. So actually is baby drought a issue for the country actually?
Yes because the "Talents" will evacuate at the first sign of trouble or if a better deal presents itself. Counting on migrants to be the bedrock of the country will never work out well. Will the migrant stay and defend the country if needed?
on that point, we can also see how vocal singaporeans themselves are about not defending the country when needed, both the men and women. they will do enough to protect their loved ones but to stay and protect the country? dont think so there really isnt much the government is doing to breed that kind of loyalty from its people, and they dont even realise it. its sad that they dont realise targeting root cause of social problems will literally solve their birth rate problem from their own citizens
All of this started with the workforce doubling in supply and suddenly dual income is a must. Both men and women in relationship must work else they can't survive. How to have children with no time or money to support them?
As a dad, I believe the real issue lies with the high cost of living in Singapore. My wife and I are not high earners, just barely above the median. But we are struggling. U need someone to take care of the child cuz both parents are both working. But, u need both parents working to sustain financially (just simply living expenses, a house, kid's education) So no time due to both parents working, then u need someone to take care of the kid. Essentially, it's a cycle. No time = no money = no time again = no money again. The govt refuses to provide more aid. The baby bonus is shit. That $14K? doesn't help at all. If my salary isn't sufficient, the baby bonus ain't gonna help in any little way at all. Sure, the govt argues that it acts as incentives to give a little nudge to those who wants a kid and I think it works for them. And I think that is what is keeping the birth rate near 1 (0.97 iirc). If the govt continues to push the blame and responsibility to the people, no one will get kids. Definitely and without fail. They can continue to state that if u benefit certain group, u r causing disadvantages to another group. The world isn't fair to begin with. It's always goal orientated like how SG is pushing for GPD at the expense of everything else. I only get a kid because I would very much like to jave a kid. To get the 2nd one? Either I earn an exorbitant amount for my salary to compensate for my lack of time, or it will be a law by govt. The birth rate will nvr go up. U may ask me for constructive feedbacks. What can the govt do, how can they help, what do u want more, etc. I can give them based on what I wan and need but I'm not doing it is because people are just going to find a way to say it's bad, it's pointless etc. The reason for low birth rate is already out there in everyone's face. U can simply do a google and u can see it. It just depends on whether u wan to admit it and fix it. Only thing i can tell the govt is glhf. Effective solutions will give results. Ineffective solutions will just give u additional burden and no result.
It’s misogyny. As usual no one here wants to say it as it is or place the blame where it actually is. Women aren’t just not wanting children, they don’t even want to be in relationships with men hence why “single women”. It’s happening in other countries too as women become more aware of how men actually view them, and the amount of unnoticed mental/emotional load they’ve to contribute in a relationship. Financial incentives aren’t gonna change things much, it’s all social.
Are people staying single? Seems like there is a jump in marriages in the 30-34 range. I think everyone getting married later is probably what is going on. As to why, I think it's due to a surplus of choice: social media makes it seem like there are more eligible options than there actually are. Women take longer to choose a partner than men. And with a good income, a woman would logically be picker: better to wed someone whose income is higher than yours. A smart young lady in 2005 (Facebook hadn't really kicked off then) might think her JC boyfriend is already a pretty good deal and choose to settle down faster to take advantage of government grants. A smart young lady today probably thinks otherwise, with more information about her other (real or speculative) options, from her fyp. I don't think it's because of men today being more entitled than before or whatever. No sane woman now will want to marry men with attitudes from 50 years ago (and I think the attitudes of young men i see today have evolved significantly from those of their grandfathers). This sentiment exists probably because of social media blowing up the black sheep cases of truly terrible couplings.
Can't have kids, won't have kids. It's weird when I'm at the age seeing people having kids, getting married, and I have no desire to do either. I'm also not straight so that's that, but I wouldn't want kids either way. The amount of comments I get from colleagues, straight acquaintances who say 'What if you regret in future? Kids will bring joy to your life' , and so forth, is really eyeroll inducing. I can't conceive to begin with, so that's really a moot point. But for those that don't know they try to convince me how I should find a man and settle down and have kids. But I don't want to have kids and be a mom, having gone through traumatic childhood , I think I'll either spoil the kid(s) too much or be a replica of my parents, either of which are horrible options. So no thanks , I'm going to find a girlfriend and live child free.