Anthea Ong is a public educator, author, and former Nominated Member of Parliament. She has founded and supported initiatives spanning mental health, organisational wellbeing, social inclusion, and migrant worker wellbeing. Anthea writes regularly on governance, wellbeing, identity, and collective flourishing.
As Singapore’s fertility rate falls to a record low, the former NMP argues that the more fundamental question may not be how to raise it, but what role fertility is expected to play alongside immigration in Singapore’s future.
Top image: Benjamin Tan / RICE file photo
“Singapore is the best place to raise young children.”
An expat couple told me this recently. They’re both senior leaders at different MNCs who’ve settled down here for years—their children were born in Singapore. Talking to them, I realised how many of my foreign friends had versions of the same story: people who arrived decades ago, met their partners here, and built families here.
If so many non-Singaporeans see Singapore as a great place to have and raise children, why do so many Singaporeans seem far less convinced?
Many rightly point out that expatriates and Singaporeans often inhabit different realities. Expats may receive housing allowances, international school support, higher salaries, and greater mobility. Singaporeans, meanwhile, worry about housing affordability, educational competition, and the rising cost of living. For men, National Service obligations.
But what fascinated me was not the disagreement on social media itself. It was what people revealed when they disagreed.
The conversation quickly moved beyond affordability. People spoke about exhaustion, time, caregiving pressures, and whether they had enough emotional bandwidth left to be the parents they wanted to be.
In trying to lay out the reasons behind our low fertility rates, many were, in fact, describing how they experience life in Singapore today.
In highly competitive societies like ours, greater resources can sometimes coincide with greater work demands and higher opportunity costs. Indeed, fertility remains low even among many higher-income households.
This suggests that the challenge is not simply affordability.
Housing costs matter. Childcare costs matter. Income matters. But even when people talk about money, they are often talking about something deeper: security, time, flexibility, even emotional capacity.
If we were to go even deeper, it would be about our confidence in the future. It’s not that people don’t want kids—what they don’t have is a life shaped to fit one.
What is Fertility For?
Singapore’s fertility conversation is often framed as a demographic issue. Yet it is also, inescapably, a conversation about how Singapore imagines its future.
Singapore’s total fertility rate among residents fell to a record low of 0.87 in 2025. Few national challenges have received as much sustained policy attention over such a long period with so little apparent success.
Over the decades, successive governments have invested heavily in baby bonuses, parental leave, childcare subsidies, housing priorities, and fertility support schemes. We’ve had multiple public campaigns encouraging marriage and parenthood. Yet the trend continues downward.
The recent debate surrounding Minister Indranee Rajah’s appointment to lead a task force on marriage and parenthood focused largely on who should lead the effort. Instead, I found myself asking a different question: What is fertility for in Singapore?
The answer may seem obvious, yet I would argue it is not. Clarifying the objective is not a semantic exercise; it determines what success looks like.
Is the concern economic sustainability? Immigration, productivity, automation, and workforce participation may matter as much as fertility itself.
If the concern is national continuity, questions of identity, belonging and social cohesion come into sharper focus.
If the concern is population replacement, fertility becomes more central. It invites reflection on how we define family and parenthood. It’ll require exploring the various pathways through which people care for and raise the next generation.
Different objectives require different strategies. Without clarity, we risk debating solutions while talking past one another.
Singapore, Continued
Perhaps one reason fertility debates often become circular is that we rarely discuss what level of fertility Singapore actually needs.
In countries such as South Korea and Japan, low fertility raises concerns not only about workforce renewal but also about cultural continuity, identity and the future of a historically rooted national story.
Singapore’s circumstances are different. Historically, Singapore was built through successive waves of migration. Chinese immigrants. Indian immigrants. Malay communities whose histories predate modern Singapore. Arab traders. Eurasians. Later generations of migrants from around the region and the world.
Our national story has never rested solely on bloodline continuity or a single ancestral population. It has been shaped by migration, integration and the continual creation of a shared civic identity.
This does not make fertility unimportant. But it does raise questions rarely asked openly.
Are we trying to increase fertility because it is the most effective response to the challenges we face? Or is it because we have not fully examined what role it should play alongside immigration, productivity and technological change?
Let’s say fertility were to increase significantly tomorrow. The children born would not enter the workforce for another two decades. The pressure, then, is immediate. This is one reason immigration has become such an important part of Singapore’s development story. Fertility and ageing operate on different timelines.
In practice, Singapore has pursued both strategies: encouraging marriage and parenthood while supplementing population and workforce needs through immigration.
Yet public discussions often treat them as separate conversations. Fertility is discussed emotionally and culturally. Immigration is discussed economically and administratively.
But are they truly separable? Can we have a meaningful conversation about fertility without also having a conversation about immigration?
Both shape Singapore’s future population. Both influence workforce renewal. Both raise existential questions about identity, belonging and social cohesion.
The Immigration Nation
If fertility is partly about who is born into Singapore’s future, immigration is also about who becomes part of it. Perhaps the two conversations are more intertwined than we are comfortable acknowledging.
Yet national conversations and initiatives surrounding fertility can only take us so far. However important the policy objectives may be, the decision to have a child is ultimately made by individuals navigating the realities of their own lives.
The quality-of-life research led by Dr Siok Kuan Tambyah and colleagues at the National University of Singapore found that wellbeing, purpose and life satisfaction do not necessarily rise in tandem with income.
I wanted children when I was married. Yet in hindsight, I am also quietly grateful that no child had to live through the vicious acrimony of a marriage breakdown that shattered me on so many levels.
That experience alone makes it difficult for me to reduce fertility decisions to economics. Other factors matter as much: a question of relationship stability and emotional capacity. It’s about the kind of life I felt able to offer another human being.
To be clear, this is not an argument against supporting marriage and parenthood. It’s an argument for greater clarity about what outcomes such support is intended to achieve.
The couple I spoke to are raising their children here. Their children, whether they eventually become citizens or not, are part of a broader question about who will make up Singapore’s future.
The conversation—and the work of the new taskforce—should therefore go beyond affordability, low fertility and how many more babies Singapore needs.
Because after decades of policies, incentives, and campaigns, perhaps the most important question remains the one we have not fully answered: What is fertility for in Singapore?
If it is about the future, then we need greater clarity about what future we are trying to build.
If it is about renewal, we need to think not only about births but also about belonging.
And if it is about confidence in tomorrow, then perhaps the urgency is not simply to encourage more people to have children.
It is to create a Singapore that more people believe is worth investing their hopes in: a country that’s confident enough to welcome both children and immigrants into its future.
