‘Want more babies? Change mindset towards less educated’

Over the weekend, former Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said it in his usual blunt style, "Get married, have babies." Else, the country "will fold up."

Over the last decade or so, the government has tried ways and means to raise our nation's falling birth rate to no avail. It now stands at 1.2, well below the 2.1 needed to replenish our stock of Singaporeans.

The government's immigration policy, the subject of much angst and unhappiness among Singaporeans, is its attempt at pushing up the number of citizens, and along the way keep the economy humming.

On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam revealed that the government "is conducting a comprehensive review of its set of policies, adding that making family life enjoyable is part of it and that involves having community facilities."

The word is that Singaporeans can expect a more robust response to the problem.

The review is the latest in a string of initiatives which includes The Working Committee on Marriage and Procreation, and the Tripartite Committee on Work-Life Strategy (TriCom) aimed at making the work place more conducive to working parents.

Still, the birth rate refuses to budge. It is a hard nut to crack. The stork refuses to make a return flight — perhaps until fundamental mindsets within the government changes.

An example of an archaic way of thinking which is quite discriminatory as well is the rationale behind the Home Ownership Plus Education Scheme (HOPE) administered by the Ministry for Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS).

On the MCYS website, the scheme is described as one which "provides comprehensive benefits to young, low-income families who choose to keep their family small. Families receiving assistance under the scheme are committed to keeping their families small and investing their limited resources in education and skills upgrading to achieve self-reliance."

In other words, the low-income should not be having too many children.

Such thinking harks back to the stop-at-two policy in the 1970s.

While the Department of Statistics Population Trend Report (2011) does not provide a breakdown of the number of children by parents according to income-level, it does provide one according to education level.

"Among resident ever-married females aged 40-49 years who were likely to have completed child-bearing, higher educated females had fewer children than lower educated females on average," the report says.

As you can see from the table above, females who have below-secondary educational levels have more children than those with university degrees, for example.

This difference seems to have been acknowledged by some of those concerned over Singapore's falling birth rate. In his speech over the weekend, Lee said, "Our educated men and women must decide whether to replace themselves in the next generation."

There are no schemes to discourage graduates from having children because it is assumed that they will have good paying jobs which would in turn enable them to have children, as many as they can. For the lower-educated, assumed perhaps to have inferior employment prospects, children are in fact apparently and actively discouraged.

While the government has, at one point, changed its stop-at-two policy to encourage Singaporeans to have as many children "if you can afford it", the HOPE scheme nonetheless still survives till this day.

On the South-west Community Development Council (CDC) website, for example, it is stated that the scheme is ostensibly to help "young and low income families and their children break out of the poverty cycle."

Some wonder if the real reason is instead to simply discourage the poor and lower-educated to not spawn, as it were, children who might turn out like their parents — not having the academic abilities to do well. The government has been accused of "playing god" in the past and for dabbling in eugenics.

Under the HOPE scheme, women apparently can also use the scheme's cash incentive to undergo ligation.

It is unclear how many women are or have signed up for the scheme over the years.

What does all this tell us?

It is quite clear that such a scheme, while perhaps well-intentioned, is nonetheless misguided. For one, "breaking out of poverty" is not about having less children per se, although this could of course help but should be a personal decision.

Poverty has many contributing factors, such as wage depression (which the government itself has said has happened in Singapore, especially for the lower strata, which include the lower-educated), employment prospects, skills upgrading, and so on. Another reason could be poor financial literacy or planning. All of these factors can be addressed in one way or another.

Instead, we are discouraging our own citizens, the lower-educated, to not have children or have less of them, while we top-up our population with non-Singaporeans, or new citizens, through our immigration policies.

With the government pledging a "Singaporeans first" policy, a scheme like HOPE should be abolished — and the lower-educated and lower-income helped in other ways. Seducing them with monetary benefits to not have children is, to put it bluntly, quite vile and should not have place in our society.

The government's mindset towards the less well-off and lower-educated thus needs to change. And this perhaps, more than all the incentives which it is expected to roll out in its latest attempt to perk up the birth rate, is what is needed most.

Singaporeans, whatever their social or educational status, want to be treated as humans and citizens. Remove such discriminatory thinking and maybe, just maybe, Singaporeans will finally give their buy-in to the national goal of replenishing themselves.

Andrew helms publichouse.sg as Editor-in-Chief. His writings have been reproduced in other publications, including the Australian Housing Journal in 2010. He was nominated by Yahoo! Singapore as one of Singapore's most influential media persons in 2011.