The Population Problem (Suggested Solutions)

It is not just Singapore having the problem of aging population. According to UN 2005 Human Development Report, this is an issue faced by (except only 18 countries) every country and region across the globe. It is such a major problem that coincidentally, Newsweek's feature story for the current issue is "Whatever happened to having babies?".

There may be many reasons for the decline in birthrate. The more commonly cited reasons were generally financial concerns, the inability to find time to balance work and family, job stress, career etc. However, study after study by demographers (according to the Newsweek article) have revealed that the true cause is the sharp drop in family size. It is actually not enough to just have two children per family. Imagine if every couples were to have only two children, they will only be able to replace themselves. However, in every population, there will be a portion of the population who will remain single, childless or having only one child. In order to meet the shortfall, couples should be encouraged to have three or four children. But to have more children, couples need to start marrying and having children at an earlier age. This is because women's fertility decreases rapidly after the age of 35. According to our Singapore stats, the mean age of first marriage for grooms and brides are 30.5 and 27.3 respectively. Assuming the couples start having children immediately after their wedding (unlikely in most cases), they'll need to give birth to a child every 2.6 years before the wife reaches 35. I think most couples would prefer to have more spread in each childbirth! And let's not forget that each pregnancy terms is approximately 9 months.

I believe most couples are getting married later because we finish our education later and many are pursuing higher education even after their diploma or degree courses. According to the 2005 Singapore stats, 55.3% of our population is educated to tertiary (diploma and degree) level.

Typically, the men would only start work at the age of 22 to 24 (after serving 2.5 years of National Service). It is also normal that a couple would only get married after a few years of working, in order to save enough money for wedding and to buy a HDB unit. Usually, the couple would be broke after the wedding and it takes maybe another two years before they save enough money and feel financially secure again to consider having their first child.

For the sake of brevity, the above was a simple example but the point is to illustrate why we are marrying later and thus having only 3 children or lesser. In order for couples to get married at an earlier age, we need to let them start working earlier. To do that, we may need to think out-of-the box and I'm proposing a bold and radical (some may say crazy) suggestion: Reduce the number of years spent studying and performing national service (for the men). If we can revolutionalise the education system where 2 years of schooling can be shaved off and national service is reduced by 1.5 years, we actually allow the men to start working earlier by 3.5 years! I know Mindef will be very reluctant to reduce the term of national service but if we don't increase the birthrates, in years to come, we won't have enough population to protect at all!

In Singapore, many women are working and they continue to work after they are married. This is a good thing. But many are reluctant to have children as there is a general feeling that companies are not supportive of staff who are pregnant or being a mother. The working culture has to change. It has to be supportive of working mothers and staff who are pregnant. We need to celebrate the miracles of life. Giving birth to a child is a beautiful miracle of the human species.

The other thing that companies can do is to start encouraging staff to work from home. As I've my own company, albeit a very small one, myself, my wife and my staff work from home. We are still highly efficient and we still get the job done. Best of all, it has done wonders for our family life. We are no longer as stressful as we don't have to join the morning rush. We have time to have breakfast with our eldest son before we bring him to childcare. And we are also able to spend more time with our 18 month old son. We get to see him learn to walk, learn to talk. We get to see our children grow.

I know I may not be able to change the company culture of others but I hope that if I manage to build a global company, I'll be able to gently influence the company culture here.

If the government wants the citizens to have a bigger family unit, for goodness sake, stop building smaller HDB units. How do you expect a family to have 3 children or more if the HDB units are getting smaller. Due to space constraint, couples would naturally think of having only 1 or 2 children only.

The government strongly discourages abortion. Any pregnant ladies thinking of abortion will be subjected to a pre-abortion counselling session and during which a gruesome video will be shown. Let's not argue about the practice. But what I don't understand is that, on one hand, abortion is discouraged, but on the other hand, single mothers are not entitled to baby bonus. So what would you have the single mothers do? Please! Single mothers will be the ones who require assistance more than anyone. I'm sorry that I've digressed but this has always been one of my pet peeves.

To address the declining birthrates, we need to encourage married couples to have babies earlier and more than 2 children. To have babies earlier, we'll need to encourage couples to marry earlier. To encourage the couples to get married earlier, they'll need to start work earlier. To start work earlier, they need to finish studies earlier and guys need to serve a short term of national service.

Instead of just the normal cash incentives, tax breaks etc, more unconventional thinking may be required. The declining birthrate is caused by cultural change as a society becomes more urbanised and developed. To solve the problem, we may need to tackle it with a cultural shift whereby family and career can be both encouraged!