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GP resource for pre-university students: Navigating parenting in the modern era
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The Republic’s total fertility rate has fallen to a record low of 0.87 in 2025.
PHOTO: ST FILE
This is a special Straits Times resource for pre-university students as part of The Straits Times-Ministry of Education News Outreach Programme.
The team behind the ST-MOE News Outreach Programme has compiled a series of news resources for you. This week, we look at navigating parenting in the modern era.
The ‘Play, Instruct, Befriend’ approach to parenting
What to do when my 17-year-old teenager doesn’t listen to me any more?
I’m regularly asked these types of questions by friends or acquaintances I meet. It seems that writing a parenting column for a newspaper attracts such questions.
So, that was parenthood?
It feels as if they were born only half an hour ago, but my enormous twin sons are now 17 and preparing (I hope) for the French end-of-school exams, “le bac”. Come September, they should follow their sister to university in the UK, leaving my wife and me in an empty nest in Paris.
While you’re in the thick of parenthood, it seems eternal. Family life is repetition: the nappies, bedtime stories, football games and thousands of dinners. But as Nicholas Lemann wrote, it’s only a “(long) season of life”, and for us, it’s ending.
Beyond loss and gain: Reframing parenthood to tackle Singapore’s fertility crisis
For years, Singapore’s efforts to raise fertility have centred on policy levers – from cash incentives such as the Baby Bonus to structural support like parental leave, housing priority schemes and subsidised childcare.
Yet, the Republic’s total fertility rate has fallen to a record low of 0.87 in 2025.
The newly formed inter-agency Marriage and Parenthood Reset Workgroup tackling this existential challenge has signalled a shift in approach. Policy reviews remain necessary but insufficient. It is targeting mindset shifts as well.
For this effort to succeed, the work group must first grapple with how Singaporeans weigh the trade-offs of parenthood in their lives, and rebalance what is lost and gained.
Why so few babies? We might have overlooked the biggest reason of all
ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH
Ms Raleigh Rivera and her husband spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they had been living since 2023, back to Ms Rivera’s home town, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.
They had planned to start trying when Ms Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated in 2025. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home-buyer credit, something Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting across the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back.
In most places around the world, birth rates have marched steadily downwards for the past two decades, even where economies have grown and working women’s male partners handle more household tasks. The Riveras may point to why.
The way we define success makes it hard to raise children in Singapore
Singapore’s fertility problem is often framed as a question of costs, time and support.
Housing prices, childcare availability and parental leave all matter. But they do not fully explain why many couples, including those who are financially stable, delay having children or stop at one.
Beneath these practical concerns lies a deeper issue: the way society defines success.
