Men should step up when it comes to sharing household responsibilities

SINGAPORE – When I married, I fully expected to share in all the responsibilities of the household.

Laundry, cleaning the house, even with the kids – if we had them by some strange freak of nature as we were not planning to have children when we got married.

Our elder boy, R, came as a surprise for us.

Not wanting R to be raised as an only child, we decided to try for another child and we had our younger boy, S, three years later.

As parents with two kids, it has been encouraging to see how Singapore has taken meaningful steps in recent years to support families.

With four weeks of mandatory paternity leave and a shared parental leave scheme, new parents can now enjoy 30 weeks of leave when a baby is born. These are important signals that raising a child is not just one parent’s role, but a shared responsibility.

Policy is only one part of the equation. A deeper question remains: How much responsibility is truly shared at home?

Women carry bigger load

A 2021 global study found that women continue to bear a disproportionate share of childbearing and caregiving responsibilities, a pattern that is pronounced in many parts of Asia.

The study in medical journal BMJ found that globally, women undertake three times more care and domestic work than men.

What this research drives home is that while the concept of shared responsibility is commonly espoused by modern couples, women bear the brunt of it.

Singapore’s total fertility rate continues to decline precipitously and much has been written about the cost of living, career pressures and housing as concerns that young couples have when they are considering whether to have kids.

Perhaps we are not asking a more uncomfortable question. If starting a family means one party consistently bearing more of the physical, emotional and mental load, is it any surprise that fewer couples are opting in?

Could responsibility imbalance be part of a larger issue for Singapore’s falling birth rate?

Responsibility for family planning?

Family planning is another area where I see the concept of shared responsibility fail. Ask any couple about it and most will say it is a shared responsibility.

In reality, research shows that the burden of family planning also falls heavily on women. It is considered a “women’s issue”, with men taking a passive role while women shoulder the practical burden.

On paper, women have many options for family planning: birth control pills, intrauterine devices and sterilisation. These options come with trade-offs, like weight gain, mood swings and hormonal disruptions, to name a few of the more common side effects.

Meanwhile, family planning options for men, like condoms, are less physically burdensome and carry virtually no long-term health consequences.

As with housework, a significant gap exists between what women believe and what they experience at home.

That was the case in my household. For many years, my wife shouldered the responsibility for family planning and I delusionally thought I was doing my share by helping out around the house and with the kids.

Over time, I came to realise how wrong I was. Being in the medical devices industry, I had come face to face with many of the awful and unnecessary side effects of female family planning, from meeting patients in the field or through conversations with female colleagues.

Through my own research, I identified vasectomy as a simple procedure that I could undergo to share in the responsibility of family planning.

The biggest factor in my decision is that it is far easier for a man to undergo a vasectomy than for a woman to go through a tubal ligation.

A vasectomy is a minor surgical procedure for men that prevents sperm from being released during ejaculation, making pregnancy unlikely. It is quick, done with local anaesthesia, and has a short recovery time. Increasingly, vasectomies are also reversible, giving men the option of reversing the procedure if the couple should decide to have kids later.

My urologist friend assured me that a vasectomy is so easy that even his most junior residents could do it with their eyes closed.

Having made the decision, I went to the GP to get a referral to the specialist for the vasectomy.

After the routine check-up, the general practitioner asked about my wife’s age and the frequency of her menstrual cycles. The GP then told me with a straight face that at my wife’s biological age, the chances of pregnancy were already close to zero. The doctor felt that going ahead with the procedure would be “a waste of public surgical resources”.

Failure to get a vasectomy referral letter was an ignoble end to my own family planning journey.

Lessons for my sons

My two sons are 24 and 21. I find myself thinking about what kind of men they will be on the topic of shared responsibility within their future families.

I hope that they will not be men who just say the right things, but also do the right things.

If I have one regret, it’s that I took too long to step up in my own household. Had I done so earlier, it would have spared my wife years of side effects and discomfort, a burden she carried for years without complaint.

Love is not about convenience or leaving the harder parts to someone else. It is about sharing the load, both in good times and bad.

I hope my sons will learn from my experience and truly help to carry the load in their own families.