My position: A family-friendly society should make it economically possible for parents to choose a more sustainable level of career intensity without making an ordinary family life unviable.
Last Sunday, I listened to the National Day Rally talk at length about families.
More childcare leave.
More financial support.
More help with childcare and housing.
And, importantly, a direct message to employers: support parents, let them use the leave they are entitled to, help them return to work and do not let parenthood become a career disadvantage.
I actually agree with much of it.
Which surprised me slightly, because I have spent quite some time wondering whether Singapore genuinely understands what makes raising a family difficult.
I think it does.
I am just not convinced we are solving the problem at its root.
Parents already know what we signed up for
Those of us who deliberately chose to have children knew there would be trade-offs.
Less sleep.
Less freedom.
Less spontaneity.
More responsibility.
More money leaving the bank account.
Nobody tricked me into fatherhood.
I chose it.
And once I chose family, something else changed quietly.
My relationship with work.
I no longer need work to give me my identity.
I do not need every promotion.
I do not need the largest possible title.
I do not need to win every corporate race available to me.
Work increasingly became a means to an end.
Bring money home. Feed the family. Keep everyone secure. Then come home.
That does not mean I stopped caring about doing good work.
It means good work and maximum career ambition stopped meaning the same thing.
Why must everybody want the next promotion?
This is the part of modern corporate life I increasingly struggle with.
There seems to be very little respected middle ground.
If you are good at your job, the expected direction is up.
Take more scope.
Manage more people.
Become more available.
Take the promotion.
Aim for the next one.
And if you say:
Actually, I’m good here.
people start wondering what happened to you.
Are you still ambitious?
Are you disengaged?
Have you lost your drive?
Maybe nothing happened.
Maybe I just have something else I want more.
Why can’t someone become an excellent accountant, engineer, nurse, analyst, designer or manager and simply remain excellent at it for a while?
Why must competence always turn into escalation?
Why must a successful career always point upwards?
There should be different levels of career intensity
I don’t think everyone should slow down.
Some people genuinely love the climb.
They want the bigger job.
The bigger team.
The larger responsibility.
Good.
Promote them.
Invest in them.
Pay them properly.
Let them run.
But there should also be a respectable sustainable track.
Proper full-time work.
Proper performance standards.
Reasonable deadlines.
A normal working week designed to fit largely inside normal working hours.
The option to decline a promotion without signalling that your career is over.
The option to stay excellent at your craft without constantly accumulating more organisational responsibility.
And most importantly, the ability to accelerate again later.
Because life happens in seasons.
Someone may spend five years pushing hard.
Then have children.
Slow down.
Care for ageing parents.
Stabilise.
Then five years later decide:
Okay.
I’m ready again.
Why should stepping sideways for a while mean permanently falling off the ladder?
Flexibility only works if people dare to use it
Singapore already allows employees to formally request flexible work arrangements.
But from the employee’s side, there is another problem that policy is much harder to solve.
Do I dare to ask?
If everyone around me is signalling ambition and availability, what does my request communicate?
That I cannot cope?
That family comes before work?
That I am no longer hungry enough?
Maybe nothing bad happens.
But maybe I am no longer the obvious person for the next opportunity.
Maybe nobody ever says anything discriminatory at all.
I simply become the person who is “not quite ready yet”.
A right to request flexibility and a culture where flexibility feels safe are not the same thing.
The Government can create the mechanism.
The workplace decides whether people dare to use it.
And the same applies to childcare leave.
More leave helps.
I will take it.
Thank you very much.
But when a parent disappears for a sick child, the work does not disappear with them.
Someone still has to do it.
That does not mean parents should not take leave. It means good workplaces should be designed around the obvious fact that human beings occasionally become unavailable.
Parents expose that problem very quickly.
Better-designed workplaces would benefit everybody.
Then there is the money
If somebody deliberately chooses a more sustainable career, they may earn less.
Fair enough.
You cannot ask for lower intensity and still demand every financial benefit of the higher-intensity role.
I accept the trade-off.
My question is whether that trade-off remains genuinely possible.
Because if an ordinary life requires both adults to keep increasing their income indefinitely, then choosing to prioritise family becomes increasingly theoretical.
That is where I think Government has a different role.
Not to give parents every lifestyle they want.
Not to pay for luxury.
Not to make parenthood painless.
Protect the floor.
Housing.
Public transport.
Public education.
Basic healthcare.
Make the ordinary things ordinary enough that people can choose a modest life without requiring extraordinary career success.
Choosing a modest career should not make a modest family economically impossible.
That, to me, is the point.
A family-friendly society does not remove the trade-offs of having children.
It makes those trade-offs possible to choose.
I am already testing this choice
This is not theoretical for me.
Right now, I have slowed my own career significantly while my wife accelerates hers.
I am spending more time as the primary caregiver to our son.
We are living more modestly.
We are using the systems available to us rather than pretending we need to preserve every part of our previous lifestyle.
That is a trade-off I am willing to make.
I am not asking Singapore to maintain my previous spending while I work less.
I am asking something more fundamental.
Can a person still be useful?
Productive?
A good father?
A good husband?
Without also having to spend every working year trying to become more senior than the year before?
I want the answer to be yes.
Public housing should protect the floor
This is also why my thinking about housing has changed.
I increasingly believe public housing should first do one job exceptionally well:
House people.
And increasingly, I think public housing in Singapore today is simply way too expensive.
I understand why home ownership has also been used as a means of household advancement and asset building.
But those objectives can pull against each other.
A home becoming more valuable is wonderful if you already own it.
Less wonderful if you are the young family trying to buy it.
If family formation is genuinely important, then when shelter and wealth accumulation come into conflict, I increasingly think shelter should win.
That does not mean every family deserves a giant flat in a prime location.
A modest family should be prepared to live modestly too.
But an ordinary home should not require extraordinary career success.
Are we solving the symptoms?
This is my unresolved discomfort with the latest family measures.
My question is whether we are using more and more policy to help families survive inside a model whose basic assumptions remain untouched.
Housing is expensive?
Give more support.
Both parents need to work?
Subsidise childcare.
Parents struggle with work?
Give more leave.
Each action makes sense.
But eventually I have to ask:
Why does an ordinary family need this many corrective mechanisms in the first place?
Maybe the next stage of becoming family-friendly is not another benefit.
Maybe it is questioning what we expect ordinary adult life to look like.
Singapore has built an excellent ladder
I do not say that sarcastically.
Singapore is very good at the ladder.
Study.
Work.
Improve.
Earn more.
Buy a home.
Accumulate.
Advance.
For generations, that ladder lifted enormous numbers of people into better lives.
I have benefited from it too.
But what if somebody climbs for a while and then says:
This is enough.
I don’t want to stop contributing.
I don’t want to retire.
I don’t want society to support me while I do nothing.
I just want dinner with my children.
Where does that person stand?
Sometimes Singapore feels extraordinarily well designed for studying, working, progressing and making money.
Less obviously designed for saying:
I have enough. I want to live now.
That is why I keep returning to the same thought.
Singapore has built an excellent ladder. I’m not sure we’ve built enough places to stand.
Different people should be allowed to run at different speeds
Somebody still has to produce the economic value that funds the society we enjoy.
Absolutely.
A family-friendly society does not require everyone to slow down.
It requires us to stop insisting that everyone must run at the same speed.
What I would like family-friendly to mean
I do not want Government to raise my children for me.
I chose them.
I do not want employers to pretend my family obligations cost them nothing.
Sometimes they do.
I do not expect colleagues without children to absorb my responsibilities forever.
And I do not expect to work less, earn less, then somehow consume as though nothing changed.
Parents own the trade-offs.
Employers design the work.
Government protects the floor.
Perhaps that is the family-friendly society I am actually looking for.
Not one where having children costs nothing.
Not one where parents receive endless benefits.
One where choosing family is allowed to change your priorities without destroying your economic viability.
One where you can stop climbing for a while without being treated as though you have failed.
One where a modest career can still sustain a modest home and a modest family.
Because some of us do not want everything.
We already chose what we want.
We chose them.