making babies

An article in the Straits Times today reported that Singapore’s fertility rate has reached an “all-time low” of 1.16, and ‘experts’ listed the recession and the recent Tiger year in the Chinese zodiac as two factors for this dip. The article further elaborated that the “very high financial cost” of raising children in Singapore as a reason for this decline.

I also read another article on falling birth rates in Singapore lately, where a ‘Baby Fare’ was suggested to supplement the current financial benefits to having children – similar to ‘Work Fare’, the government would give Singaporeans a monthly allowance which will go towards supporting their child.

Seriously?

The ‘Baby Fare’ idea is fantastic and I’m all for it, but articles on Singapore’s birth rates often raise the examples of France and Sweden, both of which are developed countries which have succeeded in maintaining a birth rate around replacement level of 2.1.

What puzzles me is why no news report has ever stated the obvious – that our falling birth rates are because Singaporeans work too hard to date. Even if they date and get married they’re working so hard that they have little time and mood to make babies (and everyone knows that stress leads to lower sperm count and poorer quality sperm); even if the have the time and mood to make babies, the fact that they’re already working so hard now discourages couples from bringing a baby into the equation.

I work 9.5 hours a day from 9am to 6.30pm most days, with half an hour less on Fridays. This works out to about 47 hours a week, with 18 days of leave a year. And the European countries we seek to emulate in the baby department? The average work week in Europe is between 35 to 40 hours. The boy in the UK gets 21 – 25 (I can’t remember which) days of leave a year - the French and many of the Scandinavian countries get 5 – 8 weeks of leave*!

Simple maths make it clear that the extra 7 hours Singaporeans work a week makes loads of difference, not to mention the extra days of leave which our European counterparts receive. Even when in comparison to the longest European work week of 40 hours, Singaporeans work nearly 1.5 hours more each day – imagine the impact this has on our quality of life, when just going home an hour earlier would make so much of a difference.

If we’re wanting to increase birth rates in Singapore, it’s pretty obvious to me that our working hours must decrease and attitudes towards work must change.

 

*: This is not another ‘the grass is greener’ myth. I have actually met a Norwegian who was on a 2 month holiday across Asia doing all sorts of cool stuff, entirely on annual leave – we have to take unpaid leave or time off or even quit our jobs to do something like that.