Forum: A family-friendly society must value care
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Singapore’s expanded childcare leave is a welcome recognition that raising children requires not only money but also time. The next step may be harder: Ensuring that taking time to care is not treated as a lack of commitment at work.
The debate can easily become one of parents versus colleagues without children.
That would miss the larger point. Care does not just belong to parents.
At different stages of life, many of us will care for a child, an ageing parent, an ill spouse or another family member. Eventually, we may need someone to care for us.
This is why care should not be seen as the opposite of productivity. It is part of the social infrastructure that makes sustained productivity possible. Employees do not arrive at work detached from family responsibilities, and good workplaces should not require them to pretend otherwise.
That does not mean colleagues should repeatedly absorb another person’s workload. Fairness matters. Employers can plan for predictable absences.
Singapore has taken an important step towards being more family-friendly. Perhaps the deeper goal is to become more care-aware: a society where responsibility for others is recognised as part of adult life rather than an inconvenience.
A society that remembers this need not become less productive. It may simply become more human.
Tang Min Hui
