Singapore’s support system for young families incentivises the nuclear household. This undervalues critical multigenerational care.

“It takes a village to raise a child”, we’re told. But when you look at how our housing, childcare, and household benefits are structured, the village Singapore imagines is one where everyone unhelpfully lives in separate flats.

Measures such as the Baby Bonus, Child Development Account top-ups, and expanded parental leave reflect strong state commitment to supporting young families. But underlying this public policy design is the assumption that children will be raised in nuclear households with two parents, their children, and a door that closes at the end of the day.

Regardless of whether they live together with their grandchildren on in separate households, grandparents provide a major form of childcare beyond preschool and student care for many Singapore families. Yet, this pattern remains peripheral in policy design and should be rethought.

 

The proximity paradox

Let’s start with housing, where incentives shape living arrangements and their knock-on effects. The Proximity Housing Grant offers $30,000 for couples who buy a flat with their parents and $20,000 for those living nearby. Co-residence, which can sustain three generations in continuous, reciprocal care of each other, commands just $10,000 more than simply living nearby.

In multigenerational households, grandparents typically provide attentive childcare, enabling parents to remain in the workforce. Co-residence also facilitates ongoing eldercare and timely responses to evolving health needs. This support reduces reliance on formal care systems and makes having a second or third child more feasible. If the state values these outcomes, subsidies should reflect the real costs they offset.

Another major financial incentive for nuclear family living is the significant financial support granted to first-time home buyers. For HDB resale purchases, Singaporean couples can access the Family Grant of $80,000, and for Build-To-Order (BTO) flats, an Enhanced CPF Housing Grant of up to $120,000 is available on top of substantial market discounts. A couple that instead stays with their parents gets nothing. More perversely, other household benefits are structured such that grandparents and their adult children receive more if they live apart. Schemes such as CDC vouchers, utility rebates and estate conservancy rebates are distributed per household.

For instance, in FY 2025, a multigenerational family residing in a 5-room flat would likely get at least $2,600 less from these combined yearly transfers than they would have gotten living in separate households.

The difference is even larger for a family that chooses to move into a HDB maisonette or a larger private home with more rooms, if the annual value of their home disqualifies them from cash handouts from government schemes like the Assurance Package and GST voucher altogether. And grandparents with no or low income who enjoy benefits such as the Silver Support scheme will lose over $5,000 if they combine households with their child.

In effect, we have built a benefits framework that financially penalises the very multigenerational arrangements best placed to structurally support higher fertility.

The problem of timing

Understandably, few young couples want to live with their parents at the point of marriage. This is a period of adjustment as couples establish themselves as a household. Yet, the way our housing system is structured makes it difficult to revisit that decision later.

Couples typically book a BTO flat, get married, and are then bound by a five- to ten-year Minimum Occupation Period (MOP) depending on whether they choose a Standard, Plus or Prime flat. By the time childcare pressures intensify, transitioning into co-residence becomes administratively complex and financially costly.

If co-residence is to be encouraged, the system must also recognise that this will likely be an arrangement decided upon after the first BTO has been purchased. Policy should therefore incentivise and enable transitions into multigenerational living, either during or after the MOP, rather than assuming it must be chosen at the outset.

This could take the form of enhanced grants for second moves into multigenerational flats, greater flexibility in MOP requirements for such transitions, or priority access to appropriately designed and priced units at the point families need them most.

The flat that wasn’t designed for three generations

There is a third challenge: three-room, four-room, and even the more generous five-room HDB flats are largely designed for nuclear family living, making the formation of multigenerational arrangements less viable within public housing.

Unsurprisingly, many older Singaporeans express a preference to maintain their own space for as long as they can. Independence carries dignity, and few would willingly trade it away. But preferences are shaped by what is materially possible. If co-residence means shared bathrooms and limited privacy, choosing to live apart is a rational response to design constraints.

Larger units such as jumbo or 3Gen flats exist but are limited in supply and often inaccessible when families are forming due to price, old age of such homes, or location. Even when available, their layouts do not always provide the balance of shared space and privacy needed for sustainable co-residence.

In this context, what appears to be a preference for living apart may in fact be a consequence shaped by design.

The grandparent caregiver

If co-living with grandparents is not feasible, another option is to support grandparental caregiving by grandparents. Across hundreds of hours of my research interviews with families, a recurring pattern of childcare involves: a grandmother who has reduced her hours or retired early to cover care gaps.

Yet these arrangements rarely get documented in survey data nor are they financially supported by the Government. The economic value grandparent caregivers produce is largely invisible to a system that has prioritised subsidising formal childcare.

While working mothers can claim up to $3,000 in tax relief through the Grandparent Caregiver Relief scheme, the benefit accrues to the mother, not the grandparent providing the care. Any support grandparents receive is typically informal and discretionary, falling short of the real economic value of foregone income and sustained caregiving.

What we are actually asking parents to do

Singapore’s total fertility rate in 2025 reached a record low of 0.87. If we want to support couples keen to have more children, we should reconsider how we support caregiving by grandparents.

Young couples are raising children in nuclear, dual-career households, often relying on domestic helpers as the default form of support, with its own difficult trade-offs. They must also navigate a work culture where parenthood still carries penalties, particularly for mothers, and where fathers taking paternity leave remain more likely to face pushback from management. Meanwhile, grandparents who could make a difference often live separately, are partly incentivised to do so, and remain institutionally unrecognised for their contributions.

While Singapore is not short on effort, have we been trying on terms that accept too narrow a model of family life?

Designing for the village we want

What is needed is an honest reckoning with the assumptions built into our support architecture, and a willingness to extend the logic of existing schemes.

First, audit household-level benefits to remove unintended penalties for co-residence.

Second, substantially strengthen support for co-residence. Households that share care responsibilities across generations should receive materially greater support than those that live apart.

Third, enable second-stage transitions into multigenerational living, which often becomes viable only after children arrive. This means enhanced grants, priority access, and greater flexibility in MOP rules for families seeking to build a multigenerational household.

Fourth, expand the supply of housing designed for multigenerational living, with built-in private zones, additional bathrooms, and layouts that preserve autonomy within a shared home.

Authorities have committed to building 3Gen flats based on demand, where low uptake is read as lack of interest. But it more likely reflects design limitations, timing mismatches, and coordination costs. Merging two households is a complex undertaking requiring aligning finances, caregiving expectations, and living arrangements.

What is missing is scaffolding for that transition: interim housing options, financial support for second moves, and practical guidance on consolidating households, from ownership structures to caregiving roles. When multigenerational living was more common, social norms helped structure these arrangements. Today, updated practical wisdom on such a transition could play a similar role.

Finally, recognise family caregivers formally. Extend childcare-related CPF support to registered family caregivers based on documented caregiving hours. Registration and documentation can be administered through existing touchpoints such as preschool enrolment records that are subject to random audits. Comparable models exist in countries such as Germany and Sweden, where caregiving contributions are partially credited within social security systems. Such contributions will not capture the full value of what grandparents provide, but they offer concrete recognition for those who perform this socially vital role.

As families grow smaller and siblings fewer, the village will increasingly need to extend beyond blood, and policy will need to find ways to recognise and support care ecosystems that go beyond kin.

But first, the policy frame needs to support parents who are already managing childcare while supporting ageing parents, and grandparents, who are already absorbing the opportunity cost of providing care. Policy must support arrangements that many families would choose, if the system enabled rather than deterred them.

We often say it takes a village to raise a child. But a village is measured in shared space, time, and responsibility. If we are serious about that, our housing, subsidies, and caregiving infrastructure must reflect it at the household level.

Kalpana Vignehsa is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore.

Top photo from Unsplash.