Marriage and parenthood have been a significant emphasis for the government (as witnessed in speeches by the PM and other ministers such as Minister Grace Fu, as well as the Golden Jubilee Baby Gift).  The National Day Rally speech provides an opportunity to reinforce the message about maintaining a Singaporean core, which can be achieved by building up strong Singaporean families through marriage and parenthood.

One of the ways to emphasise the importance of better balance amongst couples at home and at work might be a more flexible shared parental leave arrangement proposed by my colleague Loh Soon How in a couple of opinion pieces.  Other efforts to make working arrangements more flexible and accommodative of familial responsibilities whilst still ensuring work gets done in aggregate, such as improving the terms of part-time work might also be helpful, although such technical proposals are perhaps not well-suited for delivery in a National Day Rally speech.

These are ideas that stem from our report written on our POPS(7) survey on Perceptions to the Marriage & Parenthood Package 2013. In the report, we note that policies that have the effect of helping Singaporean women reconcile conflicting expectations (of a career and an enlarged economic role with traditional gender roles of motherhood and household production), such as those that facilitate a woman’s return to the workforce after childbirth, as well as access to quality child-care could hold out the best prospects of creating a more conducive environment for child-bearing and rearing.

Christopher Gee is a Research Fellow at IPS. View his profile here