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Jean Iau

Singapore’s latest pro-family push has been welcomed by some parents for tackling the costs of raising children, but others say lower fees and more leave are unlikely on their own to overcome deeper worries over time, careers, housing and lifestyle.
During the annual National Day Rally on Sunday night, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a raft of measures to make having children more appealing in the city state.
These include increasing childcare leave based on the number of children a family has, topping up funds in children’s post-secondary education accounts and reducing full-day childcare fees in government-supported schools.
Singapore’s total fertility rate (TFR) dropped to a historic low of 0.87 in 2025, underscoring the scale of the challenge facing policymakers.
The government has set up an inter-agency Marriage and Parenthood Reset workgroup, chaired by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Indranee Rajah, to address the trend.
In a statement on the National Day Rally measures, the government’s Strategy Group said the announcements were the first set of recommendations from Indranee’s workgroup that Wong’s administration accepted.
The recommendations followed consultations with Singaporeans who raised concerns about needing more caregiving time, lower child-raising costs, more affordable preschool and housing support as families grow.
The Strategy Group said the workgroup would release a fuller set of recommendations in early 2027, after continuing to study issues including work-life support, fertility and maternity health, relationship formation and education.

Experts said the new measures should be judged against more modest benchmarks than a full reversal of Singapore’s fertility decline.
Kalpana Vignehsa, senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, said no advanced economy had sustainably restored replacement-level fertility through policy and success should instead be measured by whether such initiatives helped fertility rates stop falling or decline more slowly.
“On that score, this package is more promising than its predecessors. It shifts from one-off incentives towards sustained, universal support,” Vignehsa said.
Among the policy shifts, childcare leave will now be linked to the number of children a parent has.
Currently, every working parent has six days of leave if their youngest child is six years old or younger and two days if their youngest child is aged seven to 12.
This will be increased to eight days of leave for one child, aged up to 12, 10 days for two children and 12 days for three or more children.
While the government and employers currently share the cost of child-related leave, the former will cover the expenditure for all statutory child-related leave, up to a reimbursement limit.
Wong said the government also aimed to reduce full-day childcare fares to S$150 (US$118) a month and infant care fees to S$300 at government-supported schools. Currently, families can pay nearly S$600 a month for full-day childcare and more than S$1,000 monthly for infant care.
First-time applicants for the build-to-order scheme, which enables Singaporean families to buy public housing flats directly from the government, will also get an additional ballot chance for every child they have or are expecting, according to Wong.
Every Singaporean child would receive almost S$70,000 in direct financial support over the years by the time they turned 17, Wong added.
Vignehsa noted that fertility decisions rested on confidence that care would be affordable, careers would survive parenthood, there would be enough time in the week to parent, and that support would not disappear after infancy.
“This package builds that confidence more credibly than a larger baby bonus would have,” she said. “The effects will likely be gradual and most visible among couples deciding on a second or third child, rather than [resulting] in a dramatic TFR rebound.”

Still, Vignehsa said “two scarcities” remained unaddressed: “the income and career losses that accompany caregiving, and the sheer shortage of time and energy in Singaporean working life”.
She suggested making flexible work and reasonable hours a durable, protected feature of working life, offering caregiving compensation and looking upstream at rising singlehood as other methods to slow the fertility rate decline.
Danyya Ateera, 34, a health and safety officer, who has two children aged two and five, told This Week in Asia that no additional financial benefit or childcare leave could make her want more children.
“No incentive can make me change my mind, although an understanding workplace can lighten the load a bit,” she said, noting that she often felt guilty for taking time off work during busy periods even though her children needed her.
For Valerie Ong, 33, who has a two-year-old and is expecting a second child, the need for a bigger home is a key reason she intends to stop at two.
On the reduced childcare fees, Ong, who works in advertising, said, “It’s a very tangible cost that families feel. If you give me a S$10,000 lump sum, I just think it’s just cash assistance, but if you lower my school fees, mentally, it changes my opinion of the cost of having a kid.”
While having S$70,000 spread across 17 years would help offset costs such as childcare, enrichment and insurance, Ong said the money would not be viewed as funds to upgrade to a bigger property in land-scarce Singapore. “The sum is too small to even come close.”
Wong on Sunday touched on larger families wanting bigger homes that cost more and said he had asked National Development Minister Chee Hong Tat to consider additional housing support for larger families.
Ong, however, said for couples who decided not to have children at all, no amount of cash incentives or cost-covering from the government would help since they would always have more money as DINKs (dual income no kids).
Tan, 31, is one such couple who is married with no children. She told This Week in Asia that while the new measures showed having children could be affordable, there were other trade-offs to consider.
“It does sound like a lot of money [to support parents having children] but there’s also other factors to consider like the time costs and giving up our lifestyle now to have a kid,” said Tan, who declined to give her full name.
“There are also the expectations we have for ourselves of what we want to give our kid if we have one.”


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Can Singapore’s latest pro-family push change minds on parenthood?

A young child is flanked by his parents in front of the Rain Vortex waterfall inside the Jewel Changi Airport mall in Singapore in June 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE

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Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong delivers the National Day Rally speech on Sunday. Photo: YouTube/CNA

Office workers at the Raffles Place financial business district in Singapore. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong says in his National Day Rally speech that supporting families remains a national priority. Photo: AFP

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Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will unveil plans to ease the strain on families during his National Day Rally address on Sunday. Photo: dpa

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Some parents and experts have welcomed the new measures, but say career, housing and time concerns remain unaddressed


Some parents and experts have welcomed the new measures, but say career, housing and time concerns remain unaddressed.


Lawrence Wong

Can Singapore’s latest pro-family push change minds on parenthood?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Some parents and experts have welcomed the new measures, but say career, housing and time concerns remain unaddressed

Some parents and experts have welcomed the new measures, but say career, housing and time concerns remain unaddressed