Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has promised to address the strains on family life when he delivers his National Day Rally speech. NESSA SWINN YAP (National University of Singapore) and JACQUELINE HO (Singapore Management University) argue that this requires a “thick,” relational approach to “care” that centres its value and meaning to the people providing and receiving it.
“For me as a mother, I think I want my daughter to be happy. Like as long as my daughter does not have the stress to get 100 marks back. I am fine with whatever lah. Honestly.”
“I want to ensure that the road I pave for her will be the best, one of the perfect one. So that in the future she’s well prepared to enter society with maximum armour.”
These two quotes, spoken two minutes apart, are from an interview that one of us conducted with Winnie (pseudonym) about how she chose a primary school for her daughter.
Winnie holds in her head two contradictory imperatives. Hearing about youth suicides in Singapore makes her concerned about losing her child to stress. She wants to create space for a carefree, joyful childhood in her daughter’s life. Yet she also feels deeply her responsibility to equip her daughter with “maximum armour”—ideally a university degree, “the ultimate weapon”—so she can do battle and fend for herself.
Sociologist Teo You Yenn has given us a word to describe this: unease. “Why not call your book ‘Stress’?” asked an audience member at her book launch in early April. While stress is no doubt an emotional state that readers can sense in her interviewees’ stories, Teo uses “unease” specifically to capture the gap between the way we want to live, and the way we actually live. In families’ everyday lives, unease shows up in signing children up for multiple tuition classes, then feeling sorry for packing their schedules; in national statistics, it shows up in the futility of efforts to reverse a declining fertility rate despite people’s childbearing aspirations. The opposite of unease, Teo emphasises, is not exactly ease, in the way that the opposite of “stressed” might be “relaxed.” The contrast to unease is agency; specifically, ethical agency: the capacity to act in alignment with our sense of what is right and wrong.
While the book appears to be about parental (over)involvement in their children’s education, it is noteworthy that Teo began with the goal of studying family life, and found education along the way. This is a reminder that there are different ways in which family time could be organised, different ways that family members could be in relationship with one another. But in Singapore, education—and participation in educational competition—is a central organising logic in family life. Parenting, then, is but one empirical site for examining the book’s broader concern: What do relationships of care look like in our society, and why?
Ahead of the 2026 National Day Rally, which will discuss the strain on family lives and government efforts to address it, thinking through what Unease has to say on this question helps us to see that there are different ways of diagnosing why family lives are strained, and therefore different ways of thinking about possible solutions. In particular, in studying closely the relationships between parents and children and the negotiations that occur within them, the book reveals that the challenges of caring for a family arise not simply from insufficient resources, but perhaps more from what the work of care involves in Singapore—what many parents feel it must involve.
Care as a relational practice
That care is always about human relationships is easily overlooked when we consider how it is talked about in policy. The combination of a rapidly ageing population and declining birth rates has all but cemented care on the national policy agenda. Care policy is largely concentrated on meeting the ballooning needs of a growing elderly population, mitigating the pressures of a system heavily reliant on informal caregivers, and incentivising (heterosexual) family formation.
The concept of care deployed by policymakers is what sociologists and anthropologists would consider a “thin” one–where needs are macro-structural, captured through large-scale, often quantitative measures such as population sizes, health statistics, infrastructural capacity and so on[1]. The “problem” of care is regarded largely as a matter of resources and capacity. Recent expansions to parental leave to free up time for childcare while ensuring continued income for parents is one example of the kind of policy response that arises from a “thin” conception of care. How else can care be conceived, and how would that expand the very starting points of policymaking?
The version of care that is the subject of Unease reminds us that care begins with people: as the responses of one in support of a dependent other. Care is necessarily “thick” with subjective and highly contextual meaning, being as it is centred on individuals and their relationships. From this relational vantage point, we witness care as it actually exists: in the interactions and choices that people make in relation to one another in everyday life; in the emotions, conflicts and aspirations emergent from such relations; in the often long-term, life-defining impacts on individual wellbeing. In contrast to a “thin,” resource-focused approach to care, a “thick,” relational approach centres the value and meaning of care to the people providing and receiving it.
It is only through a “thick” examination of care that the unease parents feel towards the project of raising children in Singapore is revealed.
As researchers, we are taught to pay attention to what surprises us in our data. Teo reminds us a few times in Unease that her project began as an exploration of how families in Singapore balance the competing demands of employment and care. The surprise she found was that parents struggle with what it means to care: a “strong pattern of ‘no choice’ where people feel they do not have options and agency”[2] characterises the tensions they have to balance between the kinds of childhoods they want for their children—slower-paced, more rest, more play, where learning is fueled by curiosity rather than performance—versus the people they ought to be against their peers, to the education system, and farther down the road, as adults in an increasingly competitive labour market.
In this way, the pressures on family life are not merely about the usual costs of care responsibilities, such as mental loads, packed schedules, and women giving up their careers, but also about a lack of ethical agency in how we care for our loved ones.
Parents contribute financially to a huge enrichment and tuition industry, but mainly because they feel they have no choice, not because this is the kind of childhood they want for their kids.
Why care about care? First, how care occurs—how it is provided and received—affects us all. Everyone has at some point in time been a child dependent on the care of others, the effects of which we carry with us into adulthood and shape our life chances and pathways. Scholars have also argued that children should be regarded as public goods for a range of reasons, including that they are future economic contributors and civic actors and that their upbringing can produce a host of positive (or negative) externalities to society.
Second, care is the stuff of life itself, as has been argued by feminist philosophers of care.[3] It is more than just about ensuring the safety, survival or recovery of high dependency groups such as the very young, very old, or people with severe disabilities. Our relationships with one another, capacities to respond to those in need and have our needs met, and the deep connections formed out of mutual interdependence are what imbue life with meaning and purpose. In her previous book This Is What Inequality Looks Like (or TIWILL, as it has become affectionately known), Teo showed how care responsibilities provide a strong, stable source of dignity and identity to low-income adults. Reflecting on her own life experiences, Teo also put forth her care-centred vision of well-lived lives: “We should—women and men, across class lines—learn to be good at our jobs and learn to change diapers, cook, talk to kids, do laundry, help our neighbors and friends, buy groceries, pay bills, play; we should have, in all our days, time to learn to love and be loved. We give up the mundane at our own peril.”[4]
Why care in Singapore is kiasu-shaped: Inequality as context
How care occurs is the central concern of Unease. We learn how parents’ love and concern for their offspring are expressed in a highly particular, policy-induced manner across households: care is more burdensome than joyful; more future-oriented (and therefore anxiety-laced) than present; parochial rather than solidaristic. Why is this so?
When we hear about the behaviours of parents like Winnie, our common diagnosis is kiasu “culture”—some primordial fixation on achievement and excellence. But knowing that parents are not entirely at ease with this mode of parenting tells us that values alone are not sufficient for explaining parents’ choices.
As a sociologist, Teo is insistent that culture is inseparable from structure. Kiasu culture has developed within societal conditions that incentivise this specific flavour of parenting. On the surface, this can sound like the common accusation that “the system” is to blame for the intense competition we see. “The system” is often used as a shorthand for the features of our education system that rank and sort students, such as high-stakes exams. Discussions about education policy, in search of someone or something to blame the “rat race” on, often devolve into binary debates: “Is it the system or is it mindsets?” Or, more carelessly: “Is it MOE’s fault or parents’ fault?” It is easy, then, to dismiss the arguments in Unease as yet another case of “blaming the system.”
Yet, Unease is clear that the structure that has given us kiasuism is larger than any one exam: it is inequality itself. Whereas TIWILL revealed that people in Singapore lead unequal lives that afford them unequal opportunities, Unease helps us see inequality as the context shaping the logics that guide our behaviours. The kiasu parent is kiasu because they care, and care is kiasu-shaped because competition and hierarchy overdetermine the ways we relate to one another in Singapore.
Even for us as sociologists, this is a new way to think about inequality. As Teo points out, we are accustomed to thinking about inequality as an outcome: we study how wealthy, well-educated, and upwardly mobile people are, and we study the divergent resources and pathways that lead them to those destinations. We do not as often think about inequality as the context that shapes how people manage and direct their resources: their money, their weekends, their emotional energy. In fact, in studying people’s chances of entering prestigious occupations or going to university, sociologists implicitly value certain markers of success and consider certain ways of living to be more worthy than others.[5]
In this, we perpetuate the notion that people should strive to be at the top. Our research guides policy towards interventions aimed at giving the disadvantaged a fairer shot in this unequal world. While such interventions are essential, they only go as far as teaching students how to play the game. As Teo writes, they fall short of asking why the game is necessary in the first place.[6] The rats are being trained to run faster, but the race never stops.
Implications for policy: Thinking beyond education reform
Those familiar with the education policy landscape might read Unease with some puzzlement. Hasn’t MOE tried to change the rules of the game and lower the pace of the race? Indeed, TIWILL’s publication eight years ago coincided with a busy season of education reform. The ministry made major announcements about the removal of exams, expansion of DSA, and changes to the PSLE and secondary school streaming, while politicians spoke loudly about the need for a “broader,” more “compassionate” meritocracy.[7]
Perhaps Unease simply does not capture families’ experiences of a reformed system—the interviews for the book were conducted between 2018 and 2020, when several changes had not yet been implemented. Yet its resonance with readers today suggests it speaks a truth that many still experience.
If unease in family lives persists despite these major policy efforts, then aren’t parental mindsets to blame? This is a well-rehearsed explanation in the policy discourse: DSA was introduced two decades ago to recognise diverse talents, but has mutated into yet another rat race. When mid-year exams were removed, parents “flocked” to tuition centres to ensure their children would continue to get exam practice. The PSLE in itself is merely an assessment tool; it is parents who turn it into a high-stakes endeavour. These narrative threads point in one direction: ultimately, change will only happen if parents choose differently.
Yet, this prescription rests on an incomplete understanding of the contradictory structures within which families find themselves. Recent well-intentioned innovations in policy and practice sit uncomfortably alongside persistent logics of hierarchy and ranking. The religious avoidance of any form of numeric scoring in the first two years of school gives way to a series of exams, beginning in Primary 3, that determines students’ placement in Standard or Foundation classes and guides expectations about their future pathways. The many opportunities for self-reflection and self-evaluation, which encourage students to improve themselves rather than competing with others, do not change the fact that the PSLE is a ranking tool, the first of several that select students for unequal positions with unequal rewards.[8] The race, while less visible, is present, and it is consequential.
If this is true, then “choice”—specifically, the choice to opt out—is available only to the parents whose children are sufficiently endowed at birth that they can complete the race without training too hard. The child who is “naturally” gifted and always manages to complete their homework in school can spend their weeknights playing card games. Conversely, the child for whom reading does not come easily is at risk of doing poorly, not only in English comprehension but also in math problem sums, if they do not receive additional support outside school.
In this way, not all parents are able to exercise “ethical agency” in how they care for their children. Indeed, we should ask why the version of care that so many parents wish they could practice should have to be such a conscious choice. Why do parents seem to have to fight to keep their weekends free? Why do people need to advocate for more room for children to play? Why is it that family time seems to only become a reality during family holidays? Can we imagine a Singapore where these things are the default, rather than being marked?
Is play so endangered in modern Singapore that it needs its own advocacy group? Instagram posts by PlayCollective.SG.
Ultimately, education reforms are limited in their ability to truly transform the unequal context that produces unease. A key function that schools play is to sort and rank students in service of a labour market where “talent” is often signaled by credentials and where rewards are unevenly distributed. If a student falters, what is at risk is their performance on an exam; as they enter adulthood, they learn that this risk compounds, as their worth in the labour market determines their access to decent jobs, and with this, access to housing, healthcare, and retirement security. As Teo points out, the stakes of education are high because education is coupled with work, which in Singapore greatly determines a person’s ability to manage social risks.[9] Parents, having lived these realities, understand this, and these experiences shape their decisions to raise their children in particular ways.
As such, education reform alone is not enough if we want to ease the demands of parenthood and the pressures on family life. Children’s lives and how they are raised must be examined against a broader life course perspective that asks: what are we preparing them for, and why?
Enabling conditions for easier family lives
Winnie, whom we met at the top of this piece, has felt limited by her educational qualifications in the labour market. A diploma holder who did not manage to pursue a degree, she feels acutely the salary differential between these two credentials: “With that piece of paper I have realised that there’s a very big distinction […] As long as you have fresh grad compared to my kind of education level right, there’s always a $1,000 or $500, there’s always that difference.” Although others have chided her for putting her daughter in so many enrichment classes, she defends this choice: “I worry she didn’t start early enough right, then she lose out leh. Then she next time cannot catch up. Because I realise that my foundation was very bad, that’s why everything sort of like went downhill for me.”
Care responsibilities are often conceived of through everyday dependencies: administering medication, making meals, ferrying loved ones between places, helping with homework. But they can also take on a long-term character, where care in the here and now is intended to meet projected needs. For parents like Winnie, who have learned through experience that educational credentials and work opportunities are closely coupled, making certain educational choices with an eye towards the future is an essential part of being a responsible parent. Parents believe that strong academic foundations will unlock not only financial security in later life, but also choice: access to a diversity of pathways that will afford a child the freedom to pursue their evolving interests.
The problem, however, isn’t that parents have these aspirations; the problem is that these are needs that can presently only be met through the market as waged work or business activity. These are not natural arrangements; indeed, choice and security can also be provided by public institutions. But in Singapore, the market is the de facto site to achieve success, despite the plethora of risks it demands of individuals to bear (the threats posed by AI being just the newest of these vectors). This is the result of a productivist welfare system designed to keep social rights and entitlements to a minimum to avoid “distorting” labor supply or wage competitiveness.[10]
Scholars have written extensively about Singapore’s welfare regime and the ways in which policies are designed to promote self-reliance through productive activity, i.e., income-earning participation in the market. The Central Provident Fund (CPF), a key pillar of our social security system, ties basic civic security—housing, healthcare, retirement—to employment earnings and the continued ability of individuals to work, discouraging labour disruptions or exits from the labour market.[11] State income support policies either require people to be in work (Workfare Income Supplement, Progressive Wage Model); impose employment-based conditions to access (Comcare, SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support Scheme); or are narrowly targeted at lower-earning workers and only offer temporary periods of support.[12] The point here is not that people shouldn’t have to work, but that a lack of stronger, more universally accessible social safety nets confine the pursuit of material wellbeing and security to the market. The market, of course, distributes such goods based on workers’ potential for “productivity,” which continues to be strongly signaled by academic qualifications.
Moreover, even a university degree has not been enough to ensure graduates secure jobs, much less ‘good’ ones. “No amount of frontloading in our school system will be adequate for the lifelong education needs of Singaporeans” was a comment made by then-education Minister Chan Chun Sing in 2022, acknowledging that market conditions have become harsher for younger generations and signaling the government’s position in response: policy will adapt to the needs of the market, which now demands of citizens not just a strong education as youths, but an appetite for industry upheaval and continual skills enhancement as adults.
Although scholars have demonstrated the links between political economy, social policy and unequal socio-economic outcomes in Singapore, it has been less explicit about how care—particularly in its “thick” conception of everyday relations and practices—is implicated. Unease has since made it clear that there is a throughline from parents’ educational choices early in their children’s lives to the risky, competitive and demanding market-centric futures that await them. For as long as state policies continue to configure citizens as human capital above all else, the process of building that capital will start from young and in our homes. The bittersweet reality is that care compels us to.
— Nessa Swinn Yap is Research Associate at the Social Inclusion Project (NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy). Her research interests sit at the intersection of critical work studies and the political economy of care. Jacqueline Ho is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. Her work examines families’ experiences of education reform in Singapore, with an eye towards implications for inequality and social mobility.
Notes
[1] Anthropologist Clifford Geertz conceptualised the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ descriptions of social phenomena. The former focuses entirely on observable facts without offering qualitative interpretation, cultural context, or subjective meaning while the latter is an interpretive form of understanding geared towards uncovering social, historical, and cultural context that gives meaning to action. See also: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).; Linda Hantrais, International Comparative Research: Theory, Methods and
Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
[2] Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2026), 212.
[3] See, for example: Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).; Nel Noddings, Starting At Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).; Joan Tronto, Caring Democracies: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
[4] Teo You Yenn, This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2018), 93.
[5] Within sociology, the study of social stratification has its roots in social mobility studies from the 1960s that studied the effect that parental background had on children’s occupational attainment. See, for example: Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967). This reflects the dominant formula for studying inequality in the discipline: develop some measure of attainment (e.g., occupational class, occupational prestige, income, wealth, educational attainment, or test scores), and study the factors that contribute to an individual’s level of attainment, such as the level of crime in their neighbourhood, their parents’ incarceration status, how they are socialised into gender roles, or their willingness to ask for help from a teacher.
[6] Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2026), 223.
[7] In 2018, the Direct School Admissions (DSA) programme was expanded such that secondary schools could accept up to 20% of their Secondary 1 intake through non-PSLE pathways. In 2019, examinations in Primary 1 and 2 were completely removed, and this was followed by the removal of mid-year exams at all levels between 2021-2023. 2024 saw the introduction of Full Subject-Based Banding in all secondary schools, where students can take each of their subjects at a different level depending on their strengths.
[8] These examples are from ongoing fieldwork for a project one of us is conducting about how parents are experiencing recent education reforms in primary schools.
[9] Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2026), 27-28.
[10] See, for example: M. Ramesh and Mukul G. Asher, Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia: Social Security, Health and Education Policies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Ian Holliday, “Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia,” Political Studies 48, no. 4 (2000): 706-723.
[11] Chua Beng Huat, Liberalism Disavowed (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017).
[12]See, for example: Lee Soo Ann and Qian Jiwei, “The Evolving Singaporean Welfare State,” Social Policy & Administration 51, no. 6 (2017): 916-939.; Irene Y.H. Ng, “Self-Reliant Wealth and Trickle-Down Welfare: The Singapore Story in 200 years?,” in Navigating Differences: Integration in Singapore, ed. Terence Chong (Singapore: ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2020), 189-206.