Singapore’s Total Fertility Rate hit a historic low of 0.87 last year. Every few months, a new initiative gets announced. A bonus here, a subsidy there. And yet the number keeps falling.
It’s easy to frame this as a policy problem. But the more you sit with it, the more it starts to feel like a cultural one.
Why Financial Incentives Miss the Point
Multiple schemes exist to encourage couples to start families: the Baby Bonus, preschool subsidies, the Medisave Grant. The assumption behind all of them is the same. The cost of having children is primarily financial. But ask anyone who has actually raised a child here, and they’ll tell you the cost that breaks you isn’t monetary.
“Singapore’s standard cost of living is quite high with the current prices for BTOs, food and other necessities. Due to that, many adults strive to work for money and may have less time to think about starting a family,” said Rachel Chua, 22, a university student who studied Early Childhood Education at Ngee Ann Polytechnic and spent time working directly with young children in preschool settings.
Preschool teacher Amirah Qistina, 21, puts it more bluntly. “Baby bonus schemes and such financial incentives are only beneficial short term. They are not long term solutions,” she said. “They do not change our daily lives.”
She’s right. What no bonus addresses is the stress, the mental load, the absence of a support system, and the quiet but persistent message that society sends to parents every single day: you’re on your own.
The Preschool Hours Debate
That message came through clearly during the recent debate surrounding Workers’ Party MP Gerald Chiam’s suggestion to extend preschool hours by 30 minutes. The proposal was intended to support working parents. The backlash was swift.
“I was shocked because some teachers also have children to take care of back at home,” said Amirah. Rachel felt the same. Longer hours would come at the expense of family time, not in support of it.
Both responses point to something the debate itself seemed to miss. The proposal was about helping parents work longer, framed as family support. Those serve different ends. The conflation says something about whose needs our systems are actually designed around.
A Society That Has No Room for Children
None of this happens in a vacuum. According to a 2021 Ipsos study, 92% of parents in Singapore feel judged for their children’s behaviour in public, among the highest of any country surveyed. That figure is striking. But it shouldn’t be surprising.
We have built, quietly and without much fanfare, a society that treats children as an inconvenience. A local restaurant imposed a $10 surcharge whenever a child screams or disturbs other diners. A man smeared luncheon meat along his neighbour’s HDB corridor because their children were noisy.
In November 2025, a commenter complained online about a father and his two kids being disruptive on the MRT. Most Singaporeans who responded sided with the family.
But the fact that the complaint was written at all, and that it resonated enough to go viral, says something about what parents deal with every time they leave the house with their kids.
Public spaces feel increasingly adult-centred. Children are expected to be quiet, contained, invisible. When they are simply being children, the adults around them make their displeasure known. Parents feel this. It is isolating in a way that no subsidy can fix.
What “Kampung Spirit” Actually Requires
The phrase gets invoked often enough that it has lost meaning. Kampung spirit describes a community where raising a child was a shared undertaking, where the burden didn’t fall solely on two people behind a closed door.
We are far from that now.
Amirah suggested creating parent support groups within neighbourhoods. “We should have parent support groups in each neighbourhood where parents can share their worries or even plan outings together,” she said. “This gives them a voice and a sense of belonging. Having a child should feel like a connection, not a burden.”
It sounds modest. But the need it addresses is real. Parents who feel less alone are more likely to consider having more children. Community is central to the fertility conversation, not peripheral to it.
Workplaces matter too. “If work actually ended early for parents, and they can fetch their children early after school and spend time together, maybe more couples would consider having families because they see their companies value work-life balance,” Amirah said.
That’s what work-life balance looks like in practice, as opposed to how it appears on a company’s career page.
Parents also carry responsibility here. Managing children’s behaviour in shared spaces matters. A child-friendly society requires patience and greater empathy from all sides, including from parents themselves.
None of this is easy to change. Attitudes shift slowly, and there’s no bonus scheme for becoming a more patient society.
But perhaps that’s where the conversation needs to start: not with what the government can offer, but with what we’re willing to extend to each other. Patience on the MRT. A little more grace when a child is loud in a hawker-centre. The quiet acknowledgment that families in public spaces are just people, trying to get through the day like everyone else.
Raising a child has never been easy. It’s harder when it feels like something you’re doing against the grain of the world around you. If we want that to change, the work isn’t only in Parliament or in HR policy. Some of it is in how we react when a toddler starts crying two tables away.
If we want more families, we have to become the kind of community that makes room for them.
If we can’t extend patience to a child in a shared space, what kind of community are we asking parents to raise children in?
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