Forum: Determine the impact of having children on a family’s earnings

A recent commentary asked if a $300,000 endowment per child might shift the decisions a dual-career Singaporean couple make on family formation (

Will an endowment of $300,000 per child move the needle?

Feb 16).

The premise is that modest transfers do little to offset the “motherhood penalty” – the cumulative income and career losses associated with caregiving over a lifetime.

It is an important question. But before Singapore experiments with six-figure endowments, there is a more basic question to ask: What is the motherhood penalty here, actually?

We do not yet have a clear, quantified estimate of the motherhood penalty in Singapore comparable to leading international studies. Yet, we already possess most of the data needed to produce one.

Singapore’s administrative infrastructure is robust. We have tax records, CPF contribution histories, employment data, birth registry records and education records. If anonymised and linked, these datasets would allow researchers to determine the impact of childbirth on a family’s earnings over time.

We could observe and compare the earning trajectories of women who have children compared with those who do not in the year of first birth, and whether wage growth slows in the years after; and how the effects differ across income groups. Additionally, we could examine whether fathers’ earnings change in parallel or diverge in the opposite direction.

Countries such as Denmark have used similar linked administrative data to estimate the earnings impact of childbirth on both mothers and fathers. Singapore is technically well positioned to do the same – and to determine if the effects here fall disproportionately on women, as international evidence suggests.

The constraint is not data availability, but mandate and integration.

Currently, fertility policy focuses largely on the direct costs of raising children – bonuses, subsidies, childcare support. These matter. For many dual-career couples, the deeper concern is whether having children permanently alters lifetime earnings and retirement adequacy.

Without quantifying that opportunity cost, policy debates risk floating in abstraction. Is the penalty $100,000? $300,000? Higher for professionals? Concentrated in certain sectors? We cannot calibrate our response without measurement.

Bold proposals deserve discussion. But experimentation without baseline evidence risks miscalibration.

Singapore prides itself on evidence-based governance. Before we decide how much to pay for caregiving, we should first measure what caregiving truly costs. Only then can policy match the scale of the challenge.

Lim Shoon Yin
Executive Director
AWARE