‘Parenting shouldn’t feel that way’: Teo You Yenn’s book Unease questions how pro-family Singapore really is

SINGAPORE – Across three years of interviewing 92 Singaporean parents for her new book, best-selling author Teo You Yenn listened to their aspirations and exasperations, their stories of survival and falling behind.

In the end, it was what they did not say that pained the sociologist.

Rarely did parents speak spontaneously about what they enjoyed or admired in their kids. In fact, most of them framed their children as a narrow set of educational problems in need of a solution.

It was this discomforting pattern that led the 51-year-old mother to question in her new book: “What kind of pro-family regime is this, really?”

Teo, an associate professor and provost’s chair in sociology at Nanyang Technological University, tells The Straits Times in an exclusive interview ahead of the release of Unease: Life In Singapore Families (2026): “I hope, when people read it, they feel an ache. Parenting shouldn’t feel that way and childhood shouldn’t feel that way. That is one of the big costs of having society be structured the way it is.”

In 2018, the year that the film Crazy Rich Asians flaunted ultra-rich Singapore to the world, Teo cast her eyes on life in rental flats in her book This Is What Inequality Looks Like. It sold 43,000 copies and spent 80 weeks on The Straits Times’ bestsellers list.

In 2026, as Singapore’s total fertility rate sinks to a historic low of 0.87 and the Government overhauls high-stakes examinations, Teo reckons Singaporeans are ready to look past the veneer of the state’s pro-family rhetoric.

Her diagnosis of the current malaise is a pervasive state of niggling “unease” that afflicts parents despite a world-class education system. It is a feeling that is often dismissed as irrational, Teo writes, yet is consistent throughout her interviews.

In her book, parenting is a relentless variation on the same theme – enrolling children for pre-school phonics, assigning homework, researching enrichment centres, waiting idly outside tuition centres, volunteering for priority entry to primary schools, attending mathematics workshops themselves and even quitting one’s job to school a child.

Unless she prodded, Teo would not hear parents talk about their own leisure activities at all.

The burden might fall more heavily on mothers and lower-class families. However, Teo notes how even upper-middle-class families have not used their money to buy more leisure time, but instead shuttle their kids around the $1.8 billion private tuition industry.

“Although the word ‘inequality’ is not in the title, in many ways, the book is another attempt on my part to show that unequal societies harm everybody living in that society,” she says.

“Unease” felt like the right temperature of a word to describe the off-kilter emotional reality of these parents.

“I’m hoping that the word draws people in – that it gives regular people the immediate feeling that this is a place for them to come in and have a seat. I didn’t want to be overly dramatic in claiming the kinds of problems people face, but I wanted to take their problems seriously too,” she says.

While folk theories explain away the unease as an outcome of “kiasu” mindsets, Teo reframes the parental fear of losing out as a response to institutional realities that feel inevitable. There has been talk about needing to change mindsets, but she sees the cultural explanation of “kiasu” as a lazy way of explaining parents’ behaviour in a larger system that limits their options.

“More important than ever, when there are so many ways to take shortcuts, we should be taking the more difficult way to learn about ourselves. Because if we don’t, what we risk is misunderstanding what our real issues are and misdiagnosing problems. Then, we risk coming up with solutions that are not going to fix them because the problem’s been misdiagnosed.”

Teo, who is not active on social media, is not the sort of public intellectual who is trying to appease shortening attention spans with short-form and bite-size content.

She expresses nervousness about whether readers can follow through Unease’s book-length argument, a steep ascent on the learning curve from her first public-facing book of standalone essays.

But, putting on her educator hat, she jokes that she is also graduating her readers to an intermediate sociology course. “When I was writing, there was definitely a sense that the previous book was Sociology 1 and maybe this is Sociology 2. If people could follow that book, they also have progressed and learnt some things. So, they can learn other things – we don’t have to stay at the same level.”

Indeed, the professor, too, has graduated. When This Is What Inequality Looks Like was published, she admitted to feeling caught off guard by how quickly she lost control of her words on the page.

“I’m not as much of a control freak this time as I was. Once it’s out there, people can say what they want about your work – I think I’ve become less precious about that now and mostly see it as a gift. I think this time, I will be able to let it go a bit more.”

Amid the praise for her first national bestseller, she has also experienced the occupational hazards of being a public sociologist in Singapore – as when two senior civil servants delivered a large envelope of “factual errors” to her and requested a sticker on her book to direct readers to an errata, which she politely declined.

With this book, Teo, who has received criticism that she gives short shrift to government efforts, says she has done her due diligence and is not too worried about undue scrutiny. “It’s not really my task, right? I’m not a representative of the state – the state has its own representatives and numerous platforms on which to express that.”

Many times, she had wanted to abandon writing the book, but a sense of duty towards recording the invisible heat of parenting kept her going.

“At various points, when I felt demoralised writing this book, one of the ways I talked myself back into it was: ‘Maybe everybody already knows this now – but if I think about writing for a historian 50 years from now, a lot of these nitty-gritty things will be very important for giving people in the future a sense of how we lived.’”

Teo, who has a 17-year-old daughter, is reticent about her parenting style or dispensing advice when asked. “Sometimes at the end of interviews, people turn to me and ask, ‘Prof, what do you think? What should I do?’ The reality is that I have expertise in certain things like sociology, but I’m not an expert parent.”

Her hesitation to go into commiseration and sage mode is also part of her project to convince Singaporeans to think beyond self-interest. “What I’m trying to explore is how to go beyond individual feelings to think what unease is already costing us and generating in terms of our culture – conformity without solidarity and a sense of how we’re enamoured with certain successes, but not with inherent human worth.”

Consequently, it is not “ease” that Teo thinks Singaporeans should be after, but “agency”. If social policy wants to enable better family lives, she says, policy principles need to accord parents their desire for agency.

That unease, if left unattended, she warns, could well morph into something more potent. “Certainly, people can become even more intense and there is the danger people can become more alienated and competitive with one another.”