If We Made It Free to Have Children, Would Singaporeans Have More?

Someone posed this question mid-session, almost casually: if the cost of raising children was no longer a factor, removed entirely from the equation, would Singapore’s chronically low birth rate reverse itself?

The room went quiet for a beat. Then the answers came.

“No.” 

“Nah.” 

“Probably not.”

The sentiments were clear, yet these weren’t the answers anyone expected. Not from a group of parents who had just spent the better part of an hour cataloguing every financial indignity of raising a child in Singapore. The infant care slots that disappear before your child is even born. The Child Development Accounts (CDA) that drain before your kid hits K1. The Certificates of Entitlement (COE) that turn a logistical necessity into a small financial catastrophe. These were not people indifferent to cost.

And yet, when asked if cost was the thing standing between them and more children, most said: not really.

So what gives? 

What they described was a city-state that had made the ordinary architecture of a life—a job, a marriage, children, some semblance of stability—feel structurally precarious. Not unaffordable in any single line item, but precarious in the way that every decision cascades into three more, and none of them are cheap. Adulting in Singapore is not a scam, exactly. It is more like a group project where the instructions keep changing, and nobody has agreed on a deadline.

The session was part of a post-Budget resident engagement, organised for Whampoa residents by MP Shawn Loh to collectively surface what Parliament hadn’t quite captured: the texture of daily financial pressure, and the decisions that don’t show up in policy papers.

As a Whampoa resident, I was there facilitating the session. I was also there to hold space for an honest conversation that Shawn believed his residents needed to have. He has been publicly vocal on childcare policy in recent weeks. That afternoon, he came to listen rather than speak.

The participants were a cross-section that felt almost too on-the-nose for the moment Singapore finds itself in: parents of young children, fresh graduates on the edge of the workforce, and a pre-enlistee who came simply to understand what was coming for him. Nobody was asked to represent a position. That informality was the point. And this is what emerged from that conversation. 

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The session was held as a trusted space for Whampoa residents engaging with their MP, Shawn Loh. Individual views are not publicly attributed. What is reported here reflects the themes and texture of the conversation, not any single person’s testimony.

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Read the full article here: https://www.ricemedia.co/if-we-made-it-free-to-have-children-would-singaporeans-have-more/