“Be decent mother, go through PSLE”: when children’s education becomes parental care labor


Academic Views

Associate Professor Teo You Yenn discusses how children’s education becomes parental care labour, with differing impacts on parents across class and gender lines. Contemporary Singapore appears to be a great place to raise children—safe, clean, with good care infrastructure and a world-class education system. Singaporean adults also appear to be exactly the right people to […]

February 24, 2021

Rethinking the divorce penalty


Academic Views

Oliver Sng, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine, examines the implications of a MSF report widely understood to be showing a “divorce penalty” for the children of divorcees. According to a recent study by the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), children of divorcees face what they called a “divorce penalty”—being less […]

January 25, 2021

In this zombie apocalypse, your homework is due at 5pm


Academic Views, Coronavirus

Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor, Provost’s Chair, and Head of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University. This week marks the beginning of the shutdown of schools and childcare centres in Singapore. All over the island, in households with children, adults are no doubt struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy in abnormal times. Fixed timetables; […]

April 9, 2020