Away From The Toxic Playground

Of course I'm talking about Singapore, lah!

After giving much thought to the content of my very first post after a 2 year hiatus from writing anything else besides internal emails and shopping lists, I've decided to talk about the answer to a question that I've been asked by several people: What has changed?

I have changed.

FROM TOXIC PLAYGROUND TO TOXIC REALITY

To be sure, no one remains definitively the same from moment to moment, or year to year for you skeptics out there. Imagine an emotionally high-strung person (such as myself), we swing from mood to mood in a single morning, and emotions, which drive decision-making, create the multiple realities that we experience in a single day. I might be calmly drinking my coffee and having breakfast with Ju thinking what a blissful time I am having despite being a weekday single Mum (more on this below); 15 minutes later I am sitting in my car stuck in a gridlock between my apartment and Ju's school (it is a 4 minute drive) cursing the Brussels traffic system, the gold standard of Belgian  government inefficiency. 

Chateau de la Hulpe, Autumn 2014

When people in Kuala Lumpur sympathise with me for having moved here from Brussels, I inform them wryly -- to looks of astonishment and disbelief -- that life in Malaysia is not much worse than that in Belgium. The same uncontrollable traffic snarls, the same ISIS types lurking in the vicinity, in fact the weather here is preferable and with the lower cost of living I get more bang for my buck. 

Daniel thinks that when your expectations are not matched by reality, your subjective judgment of how good a place is to live in fares more poorly. This is especially true for Brussels, a place most people mistakenly imagine as a First World city. Being included in the same continent as Germany, I am sorry to say, does not help foreign visitors at all when it comes to first impressions. The phrases "rude shock", and "utter disappointment" sum up one's experience more aptly, particularly if one has to live there. In fact I have never seen my former boss show more emotion than his sighs of resignation when he is talking about the Belgian state. In fact my boss had about a total of 6 facial expressions and 4 of them were of resignation with how things were run over there. Oh, one is eye-rolling, we did a lot of that in Brussels. No wonder Singapore is warmly labelled "Asia for Beginners" by Western visitors. The opposite logic holds true for Singapore and Southeast Asia. 

But this isn't a smackdown of Brussels, I've done enough of that on Facebook and with friends over the last almost 2 years living there. Away from the toxic playground of Singapore (also poorly-nicknamed "Disneyland with the death penalty"), I was able to think about ideas I had long taken for granted living in one place for over 30 years. Living in Brussels then Kuala Lumpur, I was forced to examine my ethnocentric views* and most important of all, take stock of my own flaws. 

I changed in small and monumental ways. I had to make changes to my beliefs, and then to my behaviour, which were really adaptive responses to the external stimuli that I was experiencing and the challenges that threw me off kilter. It was not only about the places we were in. It was about the choices we made and the attitudes we chose to use in making our choices. Singapore feels toxic because of the many taken-for-granted axioms that its citizens go around with about the country, which can be summed up in the following adjectives: convenient, safe, orderly, efficient, predictable, comfortable. Away from these safety nets and devoid of familiar friends and family, one has to evolve a new set of mechanisms with which to manage the tasks of daily life. You never really get to grow in your thoughts and beliefs because they are hardly ever challenged in the uber-comfort zone that's Singapore.

SLOWING DOWN

I realised that the biggest gain I had made away from the sanctuary of a well-planned state was to Slow Down. This was as much an adaptive response (because it is necessary when everything shuts down on a Sunday, your entire staff are out the door at 5 sharp every day, and the check-out counters at every Carrefour are designed for the patience of people aged 50 and over) as it was a personal choice.

I slowed down when it came to Getting Things Done. First discovery -- I could be as efficient as I wanted, finish as much as I could, but I couldn't get anyone else to work on my time schedule or fit themselves into my deadlines. Getting things done depends entirely on the 10 or so people you rely on to finish the damn task. Second discovery -- it's not about how quickly you get it done, it's how many mistakes you avoided. We love being the fastest and the first in Singapore don't we? But when things seriously cock up, thumbs get stuck up asses and fingers pointed more quickly than it took to build the Marina Bay Sands. I had to really push out the Big Picture Ending in many cases in order to  zoom into the tiny details we all hate to "waste time" over. I had to oversee and check on the people who were helping me (in other words "supervise") just to prevent little preventable errors. It could be a matter of minutes scanning through a quotation and finding a small detail in calculation (that blew up into a long and costly battle 2 months later); or reading a 5 page contract for a line that would come back to bite you. It would be easy blaming the staff for not doing their due diligence, an excuse we like to trot out, but as we also say, it was my neck on the chopping block. 

Koblenz, Spring 2014

I slowed down to live life. No, there were not that many roses to smell (nor time to smell them) on the dirty, dog-poo littered streets of Brussels, but Europeans are generally happier in large-scale surveys compared to us islanders, and there's a good reason for it. Besides forming the new habit of sorting my trash (I actually found it therapeutic to sort my garbage into the 3 trashcans in my kitchen) and rushing for shopping on Saturday before the supermarkets closed, we learnt to use those sacred weekends to do something other than retail shopping and eating at new restaurants. It was enjoyable to simply bask under a rare spring sun on the grass of the Bois de la Cambre (they let their dogs shit everywhere except the park) while Ju cycled along the Sunday car-free lanes that wind through the expansive park in the middle of the city. We could spend a slow morning at one of the outdoor markets, meandering through the stalls buying our supply of French saucissons (dried sausages), olives and my favourite fresh chicken innards, or an afternoon at Brussels' popular Tram Museum riding a vintage tram through the woods of Terveuren. 

Brugges, Autumn 2014

Oh yes, Europe can be an inefficient mess with most  of the bureaucracy (wait till you hear how I dealt with my export taxes on my car), but it doesn't cost much to be happy, if your idea of happiness is the simple joy of watching your kid build a sandcastle, eat an ice cream or take walks through old cobblestone streets and sip wine in the evenings as the sun set at bedtime in summer. Since we had no babysitter, we took Ju with us everywhere. Ju at 3 and a half years could sit quietly at a restaurant through dinner without much drama. 

I slowed down most of all in the way I viewed the world and its inhabitants. I had been cussing and swearing in frustration while driving my entire adult life. After moving to Belgium and Malaysia, I wondered why on earth I had found it necessary to complain about Singapore roads and traffic. There IS NO TRAFFIC in Singapore. What you would call a jam is a minor congestion in KL or Brussels. While the proportion of idiots driving in KL is certainly larger than that in Singapore (by simple fact that there is no pricing control on automobiles or prohibitive road-use taxes in Malaysia), the level of road courtesy here is miles apart from that found in Singapore. In fact I would go so far as to say you should not expect any sort of courtesy from Singapore drivers. It's as if the rat race which they view as symbolic of their lives permeates the manner in which they react to those who jostle with them on the roads. Malaysians are terribly patient about things they cannot change: rush hour congestion, people cutting into their queue and taxi-drivers who mostly drive as if they are drunk or high on drugs. I had to learn the same. There is no other way to live without going insane in KL. 

MAKING CHOICES

The biggest change I had to make was to decide what kind of mother and employee I wanted to be. Daniel had taken a job that moved him to Hamburg so I was home alone with Ju on weekdays while Daniel would visit us on weekends from Germany. Even with a part-time nanny who looked after Ju after school till I got home, it was never lost on me how I was juggling two roles by myself and how heavy this responsibility was. While every one of my Singaporean colleagues (who were childless) worked past 7 or 8pm, I left at 6pm, 6.30pm latest every day to go home to my son. In Singapore, I hardly ever worked late even with Daniel around all the time, but in Brussels I was Ju's only constant parent most days and I simply could not arrange my son around my workload, which was in fact endless. I often drove three hours with Ju on weekends over the border to Germany so he could spend time with the grandparents or Daniel when he was in the western areas of Stuttgart or Freiburg. Planning our family meetings became as normal as planning my calendar of work events. It was not normal, and the toll only showed itself when Daniel was offered a posting to Malaysia. 

And so here I am now, fast forwarding to the present. I no longer work for my previous company, a choice I didn't make without pretty heavy soul searching. The time away in Brussels gave me an insight into changing the way I used to think and behave, about time, about parenting, about what quality of life means. And the time now in Kuala Lumpur has given me a much-needed pause to reflect upon the direction of my future: how my thoughts have changed, how I choose and decide on a daily basis, be it my behaviour, my emotions or my health. It is ironic that you feel your responsibility most acutely only when you have ultimate freedom with which to use your time each day. 

Hamburg, Summer 2014

You will have  probably noticed that I have dealt quite effectively with my decision to quit my job. My current vocation? On Sabbatical. One of the most toxic parts of life as a Singaporean is the norm that one needs to label how one spends her hours between 9 and 5. I certainly do not Stay At Home even though I am only called "Mum" now rather than "Boss". After all that I have gone through, I can safely say that the people who couldn't understand my decision and who asked me the rather condescending "are you just going to be a full time mum?" might never see a perspective beyond their prescribed roles within their organization or chosen profession. 

Finally, I could describe my life now as something akin to recovery in a mental health spa retreat. While Ju is in school, I am doing the things that fulfil only the needs of my own physical and mental health: swimming, reading, playing the piano, thinking. Yes, it sounds like a luxury only the moderately well-off might afford, but it's not true.  Daniel and most Type A personalities, even many of the Type Bs, who likely only see the inside of a swimming pool while on holiday in Bali would find my life now quite aversive ("but, but...what do you DO with your time?!"). 

We all have to do the same things with our limited time -- learn something new and be a better person (oops, if you disagreed with that, then just skip to the end of the paragraph). Making a living, carving out your career, bringing up your children or taking care of your parents,  finding self-fulfilment, these are choices that are laced with preferences, mostly culture bound to where you grew up and formed most of your identity. At their most fundamental, they mean nothing more than or as much as the next person's choice. How toxic you wish each aspect of life to be depends on the importance you place on a choice. I guess Singapore is about as toxic as the next city, the next country. We each create the reality that we are a part of and the meaning that's in it. It wasn't easy digging myself out of my old attitudes and changing my view of the world. 

Life is about as meaningful as you want it to be, whether you're in Singapore, Europe, Malaysia, being gainfully employed or bumming like a low-maintenance tai-tai. 

*  *  *  *  *

*Ethnocentrism refers to the belief in the superiority of one's own culture or cultural practices and beliefs. It also describes the negative appraisal of foreign cultures against the yardstick of one's own.

Moving To Belgium

The title says it all. When I told our close friends C and G that we had something to announce, they sighed with disappointment when I disclaimed right away of any pregnancy. It's better than another baby, you guys! I protested. We're moving to Europe!

Indeed it came as a complete surprise when my company offered me the posting to Brussels, Belgium. I had previously declined an offer because Ju had been, in my opinion, too young at the time. He will be almost 2 and a half when we leave Singapore, his potty training is coming along very well and most important, Brussels is only a 3 hour drive from Dan's parents in Germany. The fact that Dan is an EU citizen and can work in Brussels sealed the deal. 

My job certainly grinds all plans for a second child to a screeching halt. I will have maternity benefits even while overseas, mind you, but it is not entirely feasible to take off for 4 months at a go for reasons that are internal to my organization and shall remain undisclosed. I shall go so far as to say that as an employee, I take my job responsibilities seriously enough that I would not put my self-interests before my work unconditionally. This decision is not entirely for fear of organizational disapproval which might affect my career prospects, though as a full time working mother, it's always on my mind. No, the reason is more pragmatic: adjusting to a completely different job in a vastly different culture (my operating language will be French) will demand all my wits and energy in the first year. There is also a young child to mind in terms of his childcare and schooling needs, as well as a household to co-manage on top of a full-time job.

So it isn't surprising that my first retort when my friends exclaim their well-wishes for our new expatriate life in Europe is not that of unfettered agreement but of cautious restraint. I'm not a complete pessimist but I have enough cynical realism to put a lid on the illusions of grandeur that some others might feel about getting an opportunity such as this. When I think of the next couple of years, I don't immediately see a life of fun away from home, or see the posting as an extended holiday. 

I consider it a great professional challenge -- working in French (a language I thought I had escaped for good after university), juggling multiple management responsibilities for the first time -- and also a personal challenge. For the first time as a working parent, I would be without constant and convenient support from family members; I will not have part-time help (which I use now) to do the chores that neither Dan or I want to do. My husband is giving up a good career in Singapore to come with me and to support our family, something that many can agree is hardly an easy decision for any male to make in any modern patriarchal society. Finally, I will have to be responsible for separating Ju from his grandparents, a decision that might not have grave implications for Ju now, but would definitely tear at my parents' heartstrings, having become used to having him in their lives. 

In making this decision to accept my posting, Dan and I had discussed at length how we would manage all of the above, and given the unhappy fact that we would have to do it in the dead of winter next January. Yet the decision came easily because of Dan's supportiveness of this step (there will be no financial disadvantage) and our proximity to his parents even if the distance is akin to driving from here to Malacca which is not far really, by European standards. Another major pull factor is the fact that Ju will not have to undergo the local school system since we intend to enrol him in the German international school there (I have written about my disapproval of our school system elsewhere in this blog). We will have to balance this advantage with the loss of formal Chinese education but this is a trade off I am willing to make. We will be keeping up OPOL (me in Chinese) with Ju and I will look for Chinese weekend class for him once he is 3 or 4. Mind you, this is not like the "TUITION" that the kids in Singapore get in order to keep up with their school lessons. It is to give Ju very basic exposure to Mandarin Chinese in a city that speaks mainly French and Dutch.

Another push factor for me is that of self actualization, something I think not all women are able to experience once they become mothers and have to make compromises in their career in favour of their role as mothers. I would like Ju to see in his own Mum, the example of a woman who is capable, strong and successful in spite of her competing demands in her family role. I would also like for him to see in his Dad the example of a man who chose an equal rather than an inferior, a man who is able and willing to sacrifice his short term self-interests (his career and financial independence) in support of his wife's opportunity and career. In short, I would like Ju to grow up in a family that sets its own rules and boundaries despite the norms of a society that limit and stereotype the roles of the man and woman. I am certainly not aiming as high as Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) expects of working women nor am I putting myself in her league, but I think Ms Sandberg's message is one that ALL women who want more for themselves than to depend on a man needs to hear and seriously contemplate.

Life isn't a walk in the park, and we should not expect it to be one! I count my blessings every day for all that I have worked for and everything that was dished to me by the stroke of luck and good fortune: a good husband and partner, a healthy and happy child and supportive parents and relatives. Oh yeah, and a good brain that works fairly well! It's all you can hold on to really, when you choose to do something that takes you out of the zone you've been so comfortable in, and I admit, I have grown too comfortable in Singapore and am ready to be jolted awake again.

I will continue to blog about this tragi-comedy called life and parenting Julien The Two Year Old Terror since I love writing. But I hope to bring a little more to the table now, as I take our journey on to Belgium. Stay tuned for more!

Bus Drivers Are Workers Too

I am a worker, I work for an employer who pays me a monthly wage to do a job that value-adds in some way. I don't produce a physical product for sale, but I perform a service which the public may need from time to time.

Bus drivers perform such a service, and a bus service is a definite value-added public good because everything depends on transportation of people. Your entire economy would grind to a halt if millions of people were unable to go to work on a given day.

So I don't understand why so many people are throwing up their hands in self-righteous condemnation when a hundred or so bus-drivers decided not to call-in for work one day because they felt that they had been unfairly remunerated compared to their Malaysian or Singaporean counterparts who did the SAME job as they did. Would the reaction have been different if the strikers had been Singaporean or Malaysian?

We wouldn't be able to say. But I suspect the uproar would have been more tempered. But then again, it is very unlike Singaporeans to go to such "drastic" measures which, in some highly-developed countries, counts as the norm where industrial action is concerned.

It came as an even bigger surprise to me when I heard on last evening's news that the acting Manpower Minister had said that a legal manner in which to have staged a protest would have been to give the bus company, SMRT, 14 days' notice.

You mean to say there is a legally-sanctioned recourse for workers who want to go on strike?! I hope the children in school are listening to this.

I agree fully with the position that there are alternatives to bring a worker's grievance to his employer before a strike is called. Do we know if the Chinese bus drivers had already done this and exhausted this possibility?

We do not, because the press and the government spokespeople have so far obsessed on how ILLEGAL the action was. And how zero the state's tolerance is for such action.

Do we know from the mainstream media if there is any veracity to the bus drivers' claims of unequitable remuneration? We do not, because SMRT, the employer at the center of the maelstrom, has kept silent on the crux of the matter -- its wage package. And if you look at the table I've borrowed from the Online Citizen, your first conclusion would not be that the bus drivers are greedy, subversive and criminal.

As a principle of ethics, it is wrong to treat any group differently be they a different nationality, gender, ethnicity or pregnant. People have a right to have their concerns heard and rectified to their satisfaction. Barring that, they are free to leave. But what if they are NOT free to leave? What if they want to do their jobs but they just want a fairer deal? Is it not their right to pursue that? Yes, within the limits of the law, but the common worker has not a legally-trained professional. He does what he can within his means and understanding. I would let the employer and the authorities decide if the striking bus drivers had any legitimate claims and if they had breached any laws in taking the action they had on Monday. But I would not rush in to judge or demand for their termination, as so many rabid netizens have done.

Who will drive the buses? Isn't it patently clear from the numbers in the table that few Singaporeans would do this job for the amount they get? It is taxing, exhausting work to ply Singapore's busy roads with its lunatic and inconsiderate drivers.

There are 3 things happening here: one, the government is trying to contain the political fall-out from the strike action by thundering on about its illegitimacy and criminality. It has to send a clear and present message to any other group (local or otherwise) that they should not even think about doing this.

Two, SMRT is trying to resolve the dispute with a large group of disgruntled employees while keeping the lid on its pay policies tightly clamped lest they are forced into the awkward spotlight to explain what looks to everyone as discrimination.

Third, the elephant in the room is the fact that SMRT had to employ this many foreign nationals to drive their buses. What is responsible for the dearth? Dismal wages that put off Singaporeans from the job? Higher profit margins from depressing wages of certain bus-drivers?

I don't have the answers, but the picture would surely look much clearer than the murky sludge it now resembles if we had those answers. But to the ignorant, xenophobic person, everything naturally looks crystal clear. 

I'll end with an anecdote. I was in Germany during the summer and 3 days before we were to fly home from Frankfurt, the news reported of an impending strike by Lufthansa cabin crew. They had been in week-long negotiations by then with their carrier about salary increments. I was furious, I remembered, at the thought of a bunch of air-stewardesses who could barely provide proper service holding me hostage with their belief in their entitlements. Anyway, the news would broadcast developments in the negotiations each day, and the interesting thing was: we were all told that if negotiations broke down, that the strike would take place on Friday from 1am to 12 noon. (This was announced on Wednesday). In addition, only the short-haul flights within Europe would be affected first.

So as expected, talks reached an impasse, the workers striked, and Lufthansa did their damage control. By Friday evening, when we arrived at Frankfurt, the airport looked normal. Talks had resumed, we heard, and the crew had gone back to work. Our flight proceeded as normal. This episode showed me that even strikes can be carried out to a certain degree of normality, that it is within the right of the worker to demand something, as long as he acted within legal and fair limits. The dispute was between Lufthansa and its workers, and to some degree, the union and workers were cognisant that it would do nobody any good to inconvenience the very customers that contributed to their salaries.

There has been no real union or recourse for workers with grievances in Singapore since this was wiped out in the 80s. We are a workforce that runs on compliance, no matter how resentful or involuntary that is. Is it any wonder that we are the unhappiest, unkindest and most unemotional nation in the world?

Survival Of The Weakest

Singapore will not find itself climbing out of its fertility rut for a while. I'll tell you one of the reasons for this: our species has become too weak.

By "species", I am referring to the Kiasu Singaporean. We Singaporeans need no introduction or explication of the infamous term, but for those in doubt, click on the link. 

Before I proceed, let me qualify that I am not saying that there are not many reasons for the global phenomena of falling birthrates. I am only pointing out that there is one glaring symptom among Singaporeans of a certain creed...that acts like an antibiotic that has become ineffective to fighting a virus. 

In an NHK broadcast on September 28 which reported on Prime Minister Lee's speech in his National Day Rally on the lack of babies being born on our high-functioning island, the reporter interviewed one 33 year old Charmaine Ho, her occupation:  "reporter for a fashion magazine". The reporter described CHarmaine as someone who "wants her career but also to give her children the best possible education". Balancing those goals won't be easy, it went on because Ms Ho is adamant that she wants to have kids but she doesn't like how "competitive Simaporean society has become".

Ms Ho said to the camera, "Having kids...is very expensive, we don't mean it in a monetary way, we mean...the kind of sacrifices you have to make [...] Maybe you have 1000 kids trying to get into the same university where there's only like...100. You're fighting with the whole nation."

Watch the clip here.

Let me pause for a moment to take in the news. Wow, this is the first time I've heard someone equating competition with a few million people with a reason NOT to have children. It's a wonder Singapore's population hasn't gone under decades ago like the sinking city of Venice.  

Yes, it's not news that we are and have been a nation of complainers (which advanced, insecure, non-G8 member country isn't?). We're also notoriously protective of our offspring and we suffer from a pathological obligation to ENSURE that their childhoods culminate in illustrious professional careers in medicine, law, or at the very least, a position in the upper echelons of the civil and administrative service. Better yet if they can get their hands on a tax-payer-funded Ivy League college education, since those degrees are worth a lot more than others. 

I get it, parents want the best for their kids. I have one, so I feel your angst, Ms Ho. But somehow, the kind of parents that echo Ms Ho's sentiment is the sort that goes beyond the boundaries of typical parental concern. Singaporean parents want a guarantee that their kids will do well, and by "well", I mean head and shoulders above the rest, even if it means they have to get there kicking, shoving and pushing others aside for their kids. And this is precisely what Ms Ho does not want to do, or at least is loathe to do. But she will do it, if she eventually succumbs to the biological and evolutionary urge to procreate. 

What I think is this: the spirit of competition is not dead. But it has evolved into an ugly, narrowminded, class war between those who have and those who have more. It's the new middle class against everyone else: the less well-off, who seek to compete with their children for the same things, and the more well-off, whose privileges it seeks to replicate and gain.

Those who have some, aspire to have more, and they will do everything it takes to ensure that their children come out ahead of the rest, no matter the cost to the children. Those who have more, will use all their resources to keep it that way for their children. Failure is never an option for those who feel that what they have achieved could be snatched away at a moment's notice. Their children's success or lack of it reflect their own worst fears and insecurities. We are a generation that has come to fear competition, maybe because those of us who have reaped the fruits of our own struggles, cannot bear to lose the privileges of the new middle class. Our children are a reflection of ourselves, even though this is a seriously warped view. Their failure becomes our failure, and their success becomes our imaginary trophies and the chimera that we are safe and secure in all that we have achieved.

As a result, the strongest don't come out of this system to re-populate the nation (and workforce), the weak that have the social capital of middle-class parents and networks do. But this isn't new, is it? It happened to Venice, and it will happen to Singapore if the class warfare in our education continues unabated. Immigration might actually be a good thing, if it brings in people of another ilk, with a taste for competition as it really is in the jungle. But is our system robust and open enough to accomodate all kinds of talent? From the economy to the government, from schools to the home, there is still only a very narrowly-defined idea of a productive, able and valued member of society. So I will wait and see if we go the way of Venice, or perhaps we will be something else altogether.  

The (Dismal) State of Play

For those of us who have been fans of the acclaimed BBC series, Child Of Our Time, which debuted in 2001, you would be relieved to know that they continued filming the 25 families after 2007. In 2008, when the children turned 8, the series was modified and only a few themed episodes were produced each year. Series 7 has just aired on Starhub cable's BIO channel and I watched the first two episodes last night at 9pm. It was akin to a family reunion with the much-loved kids like the twins, Charlie and Jamie!

I am reposting this Telegraph article written by series producer, Dr Tessa Livingstone, here. It was written in 2008 but echoes eerily for Singaporean society, which is one of the world's worst-faring states in terms of fertility. I can't speak for the quality of our children's lives in Singapore, since no valid research has been undertaken to investigate this, like the Child of Our Time response to UNICEF's report. Or at least nothing has been made public or discussed openly here. Yet there is no more crucial time than now to seriously ponder the real effects of our globalised world on our children's every day lives and how it is impacting their physical and emotional devopment.

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Child Of Our Time: Whatever happened to our children's playtime?

The BBC's latest 'Child of Our Time' investigation confirms worrying reports that Britain's young are overworked and underplayed, reveals Dr Tessa Livingstone.

From The Telegraph

By Dr Tessa Livingstone

10:54PM BST 31 May 2008

Last year, a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children shocked the nation. Even though Britain is the fifth-wealthiest country in the world, out of 21 developed countries our children had the lowest level of wellbeing – a statistic that horrified lawmakers and parents alike. It was the first in a spate of damning descriptions about the state of Britain's children.

A few days later, I started a new project. I have run the BBC series Child of Our Time for eight years, following the lives of 25 children born in 2000 from all over the UK and from all walks of life. But this year it was special. The team filmed the children continuously for 48 hours, during one school day and one home day, recording every movement, every emotion and every word.

We then worked with academics to discover what our 21st-century children do with their time and whether the quality of their lives is good enough – or, as Unicef would have it, a cause of real concern. 

We studied play, the use of technology, and the impact of the "me generation", as well as communication between children, parents, teachers and friends. The results were astonishing.

Our most surprising findings were about play. Play is vital; it makes children happy, as we discovered when we counted the number of laughs. The more children play, the more they laugh, especially when they are outside. In fact, our greatest players laughed up to 20 times as much as the children who played less.

And play does not just give children joy, it is also "work". Young children need to explore the world; they are enthusiastic learners, they need challenges and excitement, and even a frisson of danger. As one child said in response to a survey on the children's website CBBC: "Adults can be very stupid at times. Kids should be allowed to experiment and try things. Otherwise when they grow up they'll make very stupid mistakes from not getting enough experience in childhood." 

Precisely! The great players from our series included an imaginative girl called Rhianna, who messed around happily for almost eight hours, much of the time with her friend in the garden. Playing sociably in a bigger space is even better. 

Lucky Jamie spent his weekend in a caravan park with his family and ran wild for most of the day, coming back to base for meals. Others had less opportunity or desire to play. Tyrese spent only 25 minutes on free play and, when shoo'ed out of the house to go to the park with his elder sister, he looked lonely and bored. 

Indeed, parks are an indication of the greatest change in play. One Child of Our Time parent recalled: "You'd go off for miles and it was all right as long as you were back for tea." Nowadays, two-thirds of children aged eight to 10 have never been to a shop or park by themselves, while a third have never played outside without an adult. The distance children can roam has been reduced by 90 per cent in just 20 years.

Robert Winston, professor of science and society at Imperial College London and presenter of Child of Our Time, took himself four miles to school when he was only seven and has a robust view: "Certainly there is a risk about traffic, but we are over-concerned about risk." 

The anxiety about stranger danger and accidents trickles down from society at large to parent – and on to child. As another parent told us: "Whether we like it or not, there is a climate of fear for children and you can't sponge that out of your head if you've got a child." Seven-year-old Parys reflected the same nervousness when asked if he would go to the shop for milk: "I won't have anyone to keep me guarded," he replied. 

So what do the experts think? Play expert Tim Gill is worried. He believes that today's children are captive, no longer allowed the chance to meet the people and explore the territory around them. "A few years ago, I was involved in a campaign to make a street more child-friendly," he says. "So the residents had a party and closed off the street, and the kids and all the people were out talking together. 

"At the end of the day an older lady, a resident, came up to me and said, 'What a lovely event! But I have just one question. Where did you get the children from?' She had no idea that there were so many kids living on the street. It's not that there aren't any children but that those children are spending their lives indoors." 

So what are our kids doing if they aren't visible in their neighbourhood? The answer is obvious. They mitigate the boredom of being confined to home by sitting in front of a screen. British children watch more television than any others in Europe, and two-thirds have TV sets in their bedrooms. Sadly, more children today are injured by TVs falling on them than from free play. 

One of our children spent the best part of nine hours looking at one screen or another; a second clocked up seven hours playing video games. Television and the internet enable children who are stuck at home to experience adventures vicariously. Still, parents worried about new technology should take comfort; their kids are having fun, and evidence from many sources tells us that most children benefit. 

The problem, then, is not that children shouldn't be watching screens but that they are watching so much, there isn't room for anything else. 

Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist and author of the recent Government report on children's use of computer games and the internet, told me that children have more chance of meeting paedophiles online than in the park or on the streets, and offered some good advice. 

"If your children were in the real world," she says, "going to a youth group or a scout group, you would check it out and make sure they got there safely. But in the online world we check nothing. We should tell them they can't go places, we should put filters in place like locks on doors, and make sure sites are moderated, just as when we send them to a pool, there are lifeguards." 

But while new technology is vilified by many – and not always justly – there is one thing about British children's lives that most people ignore. Our lives are shaped by the way we communicate with each other. A good conversation, however short, can make us happy; a bad one, sad. So how do we chat with our children? 

We asked a random selection of people in different British towns a simple question: "What do you talk about with your children?" The answers? "Everything, we talk about everything"; "All sorts"; "I talk to my children all the time." 

The reality, though, is very different. Two-thirds of the parent-child conversations from Child of Our Time were purely functional and only three of our families had long and discursive chats with their children during filming. This is in line with other finding: one survey, for instance, found that only a quarter of children say they talk with a parent more than once a week about something that matters. 

British children, it seems, are still seen but not heard. Edward Waller, Unicef's representative in London, told me that while southern Europeans are credited with an innate love of children, northern Europeans are chillier. To counteract this, many of our near-neighbours have legislation: parents take long maternity and paternity leave and work less in Scandinavian countries, for instance. Yet British adults have the longest working hours in Europe, are more stressed, and therefore have less time to talk with their children. 

Teresa Cremin, professor of education at the Open University, thinks it is a problem. "If all we're saying is 'Do this, do that', 'Hurry out of here, it's time for tea', and so on, then we do have to be concerned that it's not a dialogue, it's a one-way monologic piece to put pressure on children. I think there is a huge value in shared social interaction with youngsters – parents can extend a child's understanding of an issue and help youngsters to think and understand." 

But if children do not communicate with adults very well, they do at least talk among themselves. The child-child conversations we recorded were energetic, inclusive and often very funny. Young children play with language as if it is a game, so perhaps it's not surprising that children's strongest relationships are often with their peers. This matters. Several researchers have told me that too much can fracture parent-child relationships and, in the long term, contribute to a "gang" mentality and a society broken along age lines. 

None of which helps children, who are already under the most tremendous pressure. Our children are the most tested in the world, facing around 100 exams by the time they are 18. Pressure to succeed has generated a stress epidemic where one in 10 children risks developing a mental health problem. 

This has not gone unnoticed. The Open University is surveying attitudes to childhood in the UK, and their latest results show that three-quarters of us think there are too many pressures on children today and worry that they grow up too quickly. 

Jay Belsky, professor of psychology at Birkbeck University, is also concerned. "We've lost sight of the fact that one can have fun and not worry about future consequences but stay in the moment. We don't value the moment, especially in childhood – we think more about whether an experience will pay off down the road in economic terms. Nowadays we're not even thinking in emotional or relationship terms." 

It has become impossible to ignore the Unicef research or feel comfortable at the bottom of the developed countries league table of childhood happiness. Most people who work for children and families in Britain know this. Can anything be done, or have we left it too late? 

For my follow-up BBC programme, A Revolution in Childhood, I asked an expert panel, what do they feel are the most important changes the UK must put into practice to make our children happier? Here are their answers. 

Prof Robert Winston: "We must be careful about our aspirations for children. Happiness, contentment and wisdom are not achieved by fame, and that's a real issue for our society, where we put our children through hoops. It's something the government needs to think about." 

Prof Teresa Cremin, professor of education at Canterbury Christ Church University and president elect of the United Kingdom Literacy Association: "There needs to be a radical change to the assessment system, particularly in primary schools, since it generates overly high expectations. We should shift it to a less narrow frameset and fewer early exams. That would make a difference." 

Tim Gill, one of the UK's leading thinkers, writers and consultants on childhood, and adviser to the Conservative Party on its childhood review: "Children live in overly captive environments, but if we improve the real world offers that we make to children and put some real energy in, open up front doors, give them things to do, then the issue of spending time in front of screens will dissolve. And they'll be happier." 

Less pressure, more play. Really, how difficult can it be?

Speech By Bilahari Kausikan

This is a speech that Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr Bilahari Kausikan, made at his high school alma mater, Raffles Institution. The transcript is available on the school website and I am reproducing it here without edits. The reason is because I know Mr Kausikan in his capacity as Permanent Secretary, and have had the privilege of being on occasion, privy to his ideas and caustic comments. Mr Kausikan is one of the -- if not, the most astute, brilliant and erudite man I know. It's the civil service's privilege to have him steering its foreign policy, although I believe his profound sense of irony and sometimes brazen contempt for stupidity (and there is lots to go around) is mistaken for arrogance. Those who think so would know they are wrong after reading this speech, and he says a few things that all of us, no matter which branch of philosophy or ideology or fervency we may each espouse, should heed. For those of you who have less than a fleeting interest in existentialism, Mr Kausikan gets to his point in the middle of the speech, at which point you begin to understand why he chose to begin with a ramble about the meaning of life to a bunch of pubescent boys. Enjoy.

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SPEECH BY PS (FOREIGN AFFAIRS) BILAHARI KAUSIKAN AT RAFFLES INSTITUTION’S 189TH FOUNDER’S DAY ON 21 JULY 2012 (SATURDAY) AT 9 AM AT ALBERT HONG HALL, RAFFLES INSTITUTION

                  When your Principal, in a reckless act of folly, asked me to be Guest-of-Honour at this 189th Founder's Day, my first instinct was to do us both a favour and refuse. But I hesitated and in an instant was lost. The temptation to savour the irony was too great. For what I am about to say, I absolve her of all responsibility.

                  My comrades and I spent our six years in Raffles Institution waging insurgency against all established authority. At a very tender age one of our teachers told us we were all born to be hanged. And if that extreme did not come to pass -- perhaps I should say, has not yet come to pass -- several of us were at least caned. Our then Principal failed to achieve his dearest ambition of getting us all expelled only due to our dumb luck. So here I stand before you, living testimony to the role of chance and serendipity in life; a role more often than not, insufficiently acknowledged if not ignored, particularly by Singaporeans of a certain ilk. And that is my theme.

                 Eighty-five years ago an American writer by the name of Thornton Wilder published a short novel entitled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book has never been out of print, but deserves to be better known. The novel begins at noon on a certain day in 1714 when a bridge in Peru -- "the finest bridge in all Peru", writes Wilder -- inexplicably collapses and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing, plummet to their deaths. The tragedy is witnessed by a devout Franciscan monk, in Peru for missionary work among the natives, who immediately asks himself “Why did this happen to those five?” The monk is convinced that it was not a random event but some manifestation of God's Will for some greater end and vows to investigate to so as to prove to the natives the necessity of divine purpose. But his investigation runs afoul of the Inquisition and he is burnt at the stake.

                Wilder poses, but never directly answers, the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” The point, of course, is that it could have been anyone of us on that metaphorical bridge. I do not think that there is any particular meaning, pattern or direction, divine or secular, in the drift of human events. History, as Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked, is just one damned thing after another. The innocent die young and the wicked flourish; and not necessarily in equal measure either because to the wicked the innocent are often prey.

                 The world is far too complex a place to be comprehended in any holistic way by the human mind. It is made up of too many moving parts interacting in too many unpredictable ways for human reason to grasp. I mean, of course, the social world: the world of human interactions, human relationships and human institutions; of love and hatred, politics and economics, war and peace, infused with emotions like anger, pity, joy and sorrow, and not the material world of rocks and stones and trees and the earth's diurnal course.

                 In the material world, the apple will always fall whether or not Newton was there to observe it. In the material world, all phenomena must ultimately conform to the laws of physics. In the material world, when we return to earth and ashes, we too will confirm to the laws of physics. But in the meantime we inhabit a social world of sentient beings who observe, think and respond so that our every effort to act or comprehend alters what we try to comprehend and every thought and action begets a never ending, ever shifting kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities that makes all social science an oxymoron.

                 Reason may distinguish man from beast, but the sum of the interactions of different reasons; of many logics, is only coincidentally and occasionally logical. That is why actions always have unintended consequences even if they are not always immediately apparent, and our best laid plans and most fervent hopes are constantly ambushed by chance and events.

                 Most things eventually fail. The shade of Ozymandias hovers unseen but omnipresent over every human enterprise, biding its time.The ancient Greeks advised us to call no man happy until he was dead. This is good advice. We can be reasonably certain of something only after it has occurred. The only true knowledge is historical, and even then there is always room for argument over interpretation. None of us ever sees or understands the same thing, no matter how conscientiously we try to observe or communicate.


                As I stand here speaking to you, at least three different things are occurring simultaneously: first, what I think; second, what I say to convey what I think which, whether because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think: deception and self-deception are intrinsic parts of human nature; and third what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey which is again not necessarily the same thing.

               One could call this, after the title of a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Rashomon phenomenon. It makes for a world without fixed meaning, which accentuates its fundamental incomprehensibility. A world in which the past can only be partially known, the present is largely unknown and the future certainly unknowable.

               None of us asked to be born. Yet having had life thrust upon us, we must, unless bent on suicide, nevertheless live. Although we can only, if dimly and darkly, know backwards, we have to live forwards. No one can live in a constant Hamlet-like state of existential doubt. We must profess a certainty that we do not necessarily feel. To keep the metaphysical horror of unfathomable meaninglessness at bay, we all, singly or collectively, consciously or unconsciously, adopt mental frameworks to simplify a complex reality in order to deal with it.

              Since the Enlightenment of the 17th Century, belief in Reason has replaced belief in God as the primary organizing mental framework of society. We are all the creatures of this western defined modernity and the most successful of the non-western countries, Singapore among them, are precisely those who have embraced it the most closely.

              Reason's children include law and justice, philosophy, literature and the arts, economics and other social sciences and even the very belief in reason, progress, technology and science. But the fundamental mode of thought that underpins these trappings of reason is still theological in that whether our belief is in Reason or in God, it is still mere belief and not epistemologically provable beyond all doubt. There is no end to philosophy any more than there can be an end to history.

              Stated in another way, none of Reason's children have an autonomous reality separate from our apprehensions of them. They are socially constructed artefacts; frameworks of ideas that we have chosen to believe in, in order to comprehend the world and comprehend in order live in a particular way. Their utility is thus purely instrumental. They are at best all only partially and contingently right which means, of course, that they are all also always at least partially wrong. That includes, by the way, the ideas I am presently expounding.

               I advance these arguments not to instil cynicism or despair but to suggest the possibility of liberation and hope. A rock is forever only a rock. But human beings are defined by their potentialities, and since there is no predetermined meaning to the unfolding of events, the potentialities are equally boundless. Were it not so, Singapore should not exist as a sovereign and independent country.
 
              The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves. This is, to my mind, an absolute duty imposed by the human condition, even if we know that uncertainty and error are constants and that we are always writing on sand before the advancing tide. Our duties to our families, our friends and our country endure when even hope is dead.

              I am sure that by now many of you are harbouring a thought that you are too well brought up to speak out loud: this idiot exaggerates. Of course, I exaggerate. But only a little, and only for clarity's sake and not to distort or mislead. So let me restate my essential point in a different way.

              Do not confuse the depth of sincerity with which you or others hold an idea, or the number of people who sincerely hold an idea, with its validity. Sincerity is an over-rated virtue, if indeed it is a virtue. All of you may be suddenly seized with the sincere conviction that that pigs should fly. But pigs will nevertheless never sprout wings no matter how devoutly you hope for them to escape the surly bonds of earth.

              And if you, ignoring the possibility of error, sincerely believe that pigs ought to fly; or that God's Will has been revealed to you; or that you are one of the elect to whom the direction of History's cunning passages has been vouchsafed, then it is but a tiny step to being convinced that anyone who does not share your conviction is not just ignorant but evil. Then for the greater glory of PIGS or HISTORY or GOD, all spelt in capital letters, it is only a tinier further step to seeing it as your bounden DUTY, again spelt with capitals, to expunge the evil.

               And it all inevitably ends as Wilder's poor monk did, in flames at the stake. Rather than sincerity, if we want to do some trifling and ephemeral good or at least to minimize harm, we should approach life with an ironic and humane scepticism. Irony to ensure that we retain a sense of proportion and as ballast against the inevitability of unintended consequences: today's error being the correction of yesterday's error. Humanity so that we may empathize with logics other than our own, if only to better manoeuvre to impose our will because in a world of competing logics, if we hope to do any good, we cannot hope to do so by logic alone. And scepticism because the possibility of deception, our own self-deceptions if not those of others, casts constant shadows over every human action.

               I have chosen to dwell on this at what you may consider inordinate length, because Raffles Institution likes to consider itself unique. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that RI is no longer unique.

               You are now only one of a number of similar elite educational institutions from which will come a disproportionate number of scholarship recipients and a disproportionate number of leaders in the civil service, the professions, business, the Arts and the academy. And all these institutions are united by a certain sense of entitlement, possibly so profound as to be quite unconscious.

               I do not blame you for this. All of you are highly intelligent. You will be very well educated. And the odds are that you will be more than averagely successful in your careers. But understand that you will therefore also be more vulnerable to the curse of the highly intelligent, highly educated and highly successful: this curse is the illusion of certainty; the conviction of the omnipotence of your ideas.

               This is the delusion that your ideas or words are validated by mere virtue by being thought or uttered by you! YOU and not some lesser being. And the more intelligent and the more successful and the more highly educated, the deeper the delusion. "The learned", Adam Smith is reported to have said, “ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”

              Shortly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, a powerful and erudite man, confessed in testimony to a Senate. Hearing that his intellectual assumptions of a lifetime had been shaken and he was still trying to understand what happened. I do not know if he has since come to any conclusions. But it was clear that prior to the near global disaster, he had never even faintly contemplated the possibility that his beliefs may have been in error. We are all still paying the price for his certainties.

              Yours will be a generation that that will live through times of more than usual uncertainty. A global transition of power and ideas is underway. Transition to what, no one can yet say. We have no maps and will have to improvise our way forward the best we can. It will be a transition measured in decades and not just a few years, and it is your misfortune that it is occurring as the technology of the internet is making us solipsistic.

             The internet conflates and confuses our opinion with information and tempts us to immerse ourselves only in a circle of those who share and reinforce our own interests and views. It shortens attention spans and privileges the new and novel over any notion of lasting value. Social media like Facebook have perverted the common meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’ beyond all recognition. Only a solipsist or, what is much the same thing, a narcissist, would think that what he or she had for lunch would be of wider interest; and only those with vacuous minds would be interested. And this at a time when the safe navigation of uncharted waters requires a prudent modesty, openness and some minimal capacity for sustained thought. And yet the internet and its associated technologies is indispensible to modern life. We need it to prosper. But what its ultimate effects will be on society, on governance, on international relations, on the very way we think, no one yet knows.

               I certainly have no answers. As you, the anointed ones, ready yourselves to assume authority and responsibility under these challenging circumstances. I can do no more than to remind you of what Sir Olivier Cromwell wrote to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1650. He was trying to persuade the Scots not to embrace the Royalist cause of King Charles the Second and so avert civil war. Gentlemen, he wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ” -- and I should explain that in the 17th Century the bowels were considered to be the seat of pity or the gentler emotions -- Gentlemen, Cromwell wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken”.

              So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 21st Century, I too beseech you from whatever portion of anatomy you consider most dear, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

              Before I conclude, you may wish to know how it all ended. Cromwell's advice was not heeded. Shortly thereafter, the third English Civil War broke out. This set in motion a historical trajectory of political, social and economic changes that led to modern Britain, the industrial revolution, the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Empire, the founding of Singapore and ultimately, you and I.

              And all because good advice fell on deaf years. What better way to appreciate the irony and contingency of events than to ponder what may have happened if Cromwell's advice was in fact taken and civil war avoided. And as you do so, consider also the possibility that you may be mistaken when you think you are mistaken.

             And with that final paradox I will end.

             Thank you for listening to me.
                                     

My Own One Child Policy

Yesterday, in an informal setting, my boss remarked that it wouldn't be long before I had another kid. I hastily rejoindered that I was stopping at one. Like anyone who has heard me say that, my boss scoffed that her colleague had said the same thing and after a few years (from the first baby), she was now trying for the second. My boss is single but lest anyone assumes she is anti-natal in her management style, she has very definite opinions about gender equality and the right of female employees to maternal benefits. I was extremely heartened to hear her do a mathematical comparison between the amount of (paid) time off a male employee takes for annual obligatory military reservice for the 15 or more years during the peak of his career, which far exceeds any amount of maternity leave a woman might potentially take to bear a child. (If anyone is wondering, it's 4 months, going by our total fertility rate of 1.2 children per female). 

I've posted elsewhere about how the clowns who call themselves policymakers can improve our abysmal fertility rates (ameliorate social inequality for example) and encourage earlier marriage (which increases the odds of 2 or more children being born). The same clowns who beseech you to marry earlier (and settle for the one who's second to ideal since you won't ever find the ideal partner) and have kids would tell you in the same breath that marriage and parenting is a personal choice (as if this absolves the state from its policy failures in this department). I've already zoomed in on our rising social inequality and the status anxiety of middle class people as a root cause of this problem.

I'm going to state categorically today that meritocracy breeds inequality, cements it and reproduces even more inequality.

And why should we care? Because the more unequal society becomes, the less likely people will have 2.1 children and the less likely you get economic growth of the sort that isn't perverted by cheap foreign labour. Of course this is not the whole answer, it's just part of the equation, but I'm not an economist and I'm here only to show that an unfettered meritocracy is not only harmful to the good of society (mental and physical health outcomes, social stability, low unemployment), it simply raises the overall cost of having children.

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Meritocracies Favour the Rich

Jason DeParle's article in the New York Times described how latest trends in American households showed that the greatest increase in economic inequality was seen in families with children (see diagram). Why should we care? Simple: the more worse-off or well-off you feel, the less or more likely you are to have babies.

As the article notes, one thing affluent do with their money is buy enrichment activities for their children, such as tutors, sports and private schools. The gap between what upper- and lower-income families spend in this way has grown rapidly, from about $2,700 a year in the early 1970s to $7,600 a year in the mid-2000s.

Do we see the same trend of income disparities between the top and bottom wage earners in Singapore? I couldn't find the same breakdown in terms of families and singles, but I found 2011 figures for individuals in households that attest to the widening gap between rich and poor:

Source: Department of  Statistics, Singapore (2011)*

Even if you look only at the red line (income after accounting for transfers and taxes), the top earners here made about 8 times what the bottom did. The two spikes took place during the 2007 global financial crisis, when income inequality in Singapore spiked to the highest ever in a decade.What does that mean? In any serious market aberration like a financial crisis, the poor are the worst hit. So wealthier people not only have more resources than a poorer counterpart to spend on each child, they are less vulnerable and susceptible to financial gloom and doom.

Given this basic cost-benefit analysis, you and I would logically have only one child to increase our kid's odds in a zero-sum competition with other kids. In fact, this is the reality in China: in Shanxi province where the one-child policy was suspended, data showed no increase in TFR. The Chinese, when given the choice to have more than one child, chose not to.

Let me recover from the shock (duh). China's income inequality is notorious, especially in coastal cities like Shanghai. Going back to the meritocracy system (one in which people are rewarded according to their abilities rather than status or caste) which is essentially a system of social inequality, unequal outcomes is defended as logical in order that (a) the most talented people do the most important jobs and (b) these talented people are appropriately rewarded so it balances the cost of doing these jobs (like time, effort or the training required to do the job, e.g. studying medicine). 

This is classic functional theory (a la Davis and Moore ) and the criticisms of this theory is just as obvious. Who determines what is a more functionally important job, and who determines what is an appropriate reward? If meritocracy were as perfectly operationalized as it is idealistic in its claim to fairness of opportunity, then CEOs of major banks and tobacco companies should make about as much money as a high school mathematics teacher or a doctor. In fact, a doctor in Germany or Norway doesn't make that much more than a teacher or a waste collector. Obviously, the doctor pays more taxes than the waste collector, but the status of the waste collector and high school teacher isn't as starkly lower in Europe as compared to Asia. Basically, meritocracy cannot guarantee that the subjective and differential social status of a job (which is also culturally determined) does not affect the economic value of the job and thereby, how much said worker is paid. The Europeans figured this out and that's why they worked out a system of redistribution (what our politicians pejoratively dismiss as the welfare-state) to make sure that the postman is able to have as many children as the doctor, and that his children would be accorded the same opportunities in education and health as those of the doctor.

It makes perfect sense then, that in highly developed and highly meritocratic (read: unequal) societies like Singapore and the United States, people who want access to more vital resources like education, healthcare would choose to have fewer children. Fewer children means more income to procure the very resources needed for each child to success in a meritocracy. Immigration is the only reason the Americans are not experiencing what the rest of the OECD is experiencing in low birthrates. You can have a meritocracy, I am by no means denouncing this as the least objectionable system of rewarding people, but just like democracy is the least objectionable form of governance, you need something else to fix the bad effects inherent in any system. And this system, call it welfare or call it a donkey-kong, depends on what that society deems is most important for all. In this respect, I admit that democracies are the best tool to ensure such an outcome.

Don't quote me, see the evidence out there that inequality is associated with lower levels of fertility (Perrotti, 1993).  Scholars have emphasized the role of equality in allowing individuals to overcome fixed costs of investment in human capital: if a society is more equal, given the same level of income, a higher fraction of its poor would be willing to undertake investments with considerable fixed costs. There are good reasons to believe that education investment is precisely characterized by fixed costs and increasing returns.

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The Myth that Meritocracy and Inequality are essential for Economic Growth

Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire (1998) showed that there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in asset distribution and long-term growth. In fact inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but not for the rich, which gives you a clue why your highly-paid politicians keep telling you that our GINI coefficient is okay and still lower than in "other countries". It's funny how they tout Finland and Denmark as role models in terms of education and innovation but leave out the fact that they are also highly equal societies. When someone brings that up, you will hear the automatic reply that the Finns pay more taxes. Hello, if I could get universal healthcare, 2 years of paid maternity/paternity leave (without fear of the chop) and free quality childcare (and not some half-baked, overpriced pre-school programme) in exchange for giving up 30% of my income (which is higher than the average Singaporean's anyway), I AM WILLING PAY MORE TAXES, HAPPILY.

Plus, more and/or better redistribution doesn't necessarily equate to more taxes for ALL segments of society. You just need to tax the richer (who, at the moment are paying ridiculously low rates). Warren Buffett called for the government to increase taxes on his and his peers' incomes, for crying out loud. And if you do a check, you will see that the amount of taxes collected through our famous ERP (road-use toll) last year outstripped personal income taxes by manyfold. Where's all that money going to?

Inequality can be harmful to long run economic growth by making it harder to implement economic reforms. Inequality can reduce the base of support for fundamental structural transformations necessary to embark on a path of high growth because inequality tends to result in polarized societies and polarized societies may be in a weaker position to undertake fundamental economic reforms (I'm thinking of Greece now). Rodrik (1998) has provided empirical evidence that unequal societies are less likely to carry out the adjustments necessary to respond to negative macroeconomic shocks. Indeed, Rodrik finds that what is particularly destructive is a combination of high inequality and poor institutions of conflict management (such as social safety nets, democratic institutions, rule of law, and efficient government institutions). In Singapore, we can say that these had always existed, and were a major reason why our country managed to pull out of each major financial crisis when other countries buckled. 

You may say that Singapore does fine, as we have a bunch of technocrats helming the ship, but however benign and sagely your authoritarian regime may be, it's contingent on the same regime being able to replenish its ranks. The Chinese do not believe that the wealth of a family could outlast three generations for this reason. We cannot rely on a bunch of technocrats who are the bottom-feeders of the meritocratic trench.

Today we are seeing the effects of policies that supported an unfettered economic growth and inadequate resources channelled to remedying the ill effects of that "growth". The ultra rich here do not pay enough taxes to ameliorate the stagnant incomes of the lower classes and the toxic outcomes of inflation. At a time when more and more people need universal healthcare, comprehensive insurance and a level playing field for school-age children, you see trends that instead reveal rising income poverty (the poor are taxed more than the rich when it comes to falling sick and basic goods and services), and rich-poor divide. The Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the best record of psycho-social health (Wilkinson and Pickette 2009).

Back to my proposition: babies have everything to do with meritocracy and how unequal a society is. I'm not feeling very well-off as an individual. I do well on a statistical graph of average incomes in Singapore but it tells you nothing about how confident I feel in my ability to provide a reasonable amount of resources to my child. This story is not found in the median incomes chart or the GDP growth chart. It's in the other chart that your politicians would rather not address. 

What would I do then? As an individual without much power to mobilise for lofty social change, I do what the other 2 million or so of my countrymen would obviously do: Stop At One. 

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*Dept of Statistics Singapore: Key Household Income Characteristics and Household Income Trends, 2011

Deininger and Squire, 1998, New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth, Journal of Developmental Economics, 57(2): 259-87.

Perotti, Roberto, 1993, Political Equilibrium, Income Distribution, and Growth, Review of
Economic Studies 60(4): 755-76.

Rodrik, Dani, 1998, Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Growth Collapses and
Social Conflict. NBER Working Paper 6350.

Juju Finds His Junk (and why he won't need MOE's new & improved sex-ed)

A couple of weeks ago, Ju started groping around his groin each time we plonked him down for a diaper change. You can just imagine my initial horror as I watched his right thumb and forefinger nab his little penis and start messing around with it. By the way, Ju is only 13 months and a half. A discreet check confirmed that he wasn't doing a premature version of childhood masturbation but I did cast suspicious glances at him every time he tugged at the front of his diaper.

So after I was sure that my baby wasn't wanking off during diaper changes, I wondered about the possible reasons for it and only one came to mind: curiosity. The guy has barely seen his junk since he was born. I mean, he only started sitting up at 5 or 6 months and his belly is so rotund that he hardly sees anything below it even during bath time. So it's no surprise that once he mastered some hand-eye coordination, his hand would stray below his belt, so to speak, to explore and discover the crown jewels.

My husband and friends know me well enough to expect that I would take the most liberal approach to sex education with Ju, but in fact, ever since I became a parent, my attitude towards my son's sexual education  has veered dangerously to the right. Daniel, of course, advocates girlfriends as early as possible (in keeping with Daddy's historical exploits) and losing his virginity at no later than 15. I would protest vociferously and order that Ju will NOT bring any girls home until he moves out of my house, to which Daniel would roll his eyes and our sparring would go on.

This post is starting to sound like a precursor to a flaming of the MOE's latest sex education fracas but it won't be, I promise. There are so many people out there doing it already that I feel kind of sorry for MOE, who didn't really care to get into this in the first place if not for the AWARE saga two years ago. (You can read coverage about it here and a concise, tongue-in-cheek one by The Economist here.)

I find it healthy and helpful for parents to discuss how they want to raise their sons and daughters to approach sex, sexuality and relationships. It's never too early and the conversation between you and your spouse should begin even before your child finds his genitals. I have accepted the fact that my kid will start to have this conversation (be it in his head or with his friends) before he hits puberty and anyone who thinks that an 11 year old is still a child is obviously as deluded as any one of Kong Hee's rabid supporters who attacked the media last week outside the courthouse like the crew of extras from the Planet Of The Apes.

The so-called "conservative view" (hitherto espoused by a very silent segment of Singapore because I've so far not heard anyone come out and declare their conservative view, but plenty of people happily repeating said view) makes an erroneous moral assumption that educating kids about health preventive methods (like contraception) is by implication an approval of promiscuity. I cannot emphasize more how wrong this view is and how ludicrously uninformed the assumption. There is NO evidence that people who are informed about contraceptive methods engage in more sexual intercourse at an earlier age (see the Dutch experience). But there is PLENTY of evidence that in countries where people are not formally educated about sex and preventive methods, there is the highest rates of abortion (also due to unavailability of legal abortion). I searched for data on our abortion rates among the developed nations and Singapore has higher rates compared with Holland, Spain, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Japan. This doesn't prove that people from these countries are less promiscuous, but it sure does prove that fewer of their women compared to ours end up with unwanted pregnancies. In Singapore, it is not so much the teens who are seeking abortions but adult women: ignorant teenagers grow up to become ignorant adults. If you still don't see the logic, then try soaking up the number of teenagers -- boys and girls -- getting infected with sexually-transmitted infections year on year (see here and here).

As Adam Lee puts it bluntly but succinctly in his book Daylight Atheism:
"The deepest irony is that the religious right’s rigid opposition to contraception and sex education hasn’t produced a more stable or healthier society, but has resulted in the opposite. Among Western nations, the United States has the highest divorce rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate, and the highest rate of STD infection; and within the United States, the highest rates of these social ills are found among the highly conservative, highly religious states usually referred to as the Bible Belt. Meanwhile, a 1999 study by conservative Christian pollster George Barna found that atheists as a group have lower divorce rates than virtually all Christian denominations, including Baptists, Pentecostals, born-agains, and evangelicals."

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Teenagers are not only curious, they happen to enjoy pissing adults off by doing exactly what adults don't want them to do. You're doing every child a disservice by keeping information from him or her that would save their lives and keep them free of disease.

At 13 months, this is what Ju hears when we tell him NOT to do something cos it's bad for him:

Me: Ju! Get off the table, it's dangerous.
Ju hears: Ju! ba-ba-ba-ba-ba (Mummy is paying attention!)
Me: I said leg OFF!
Ju hears: Ai-ai-ah-ah-ah! (Mummy likes what I'm doing! Let's do it again)
Me: One more time and I'm smacking you (hand raised)
Ju hears: Ba-bah-bah! (ooh, I like being spanked)
Me: That's it (I smack his leg). Naughty boy (I carry him away from the table).
Ju: (Giggles. I'm so bored with this. Ooh, there's my car.) 

And this repeats itself two more times in the space of 30 minutes. You say he's going to exercise more logic and self-restraint at age 13? Let's see what sort of conversation we will have when he is13:

Me: Don't have sex with your girlfriend because sex is special and you should do only when you love her.
Ju hears:  I don't trust you not to fuck her. Plus I don't think you love her.

Me: If you really love her, you can wait till you're married, Ju.
Ju hears: Don't be horny, keep it in your pants till you're 35.

Me: Use common sense! No sex means no HIV, STD, STI and pregnancy. Don't you want a bright future at NUS Medical School?
Ju hears: Just ignore the nice, nice feeling when you go near the girl and your hard, hard dickie like going to explode because otherwise you will get some fuck disease and cannot go to college.

Thanks for the advice, MOE, but no thanks. Anyone who reads any publication other than the Bible and the Straits Times will know that hormones mixed with an increased spike in emotion (during foreplay for example) will prevail over the "rational" logic that abstaining from sex would save you a lot of potential problems. Hey, as a mother, I will be the first one to tell you I would rather pull out my eyeballs through my nostrils than approve of my son humping a 14 year old girl. But I'm going to tell you that there are a few very possible outcomes if I don't teach him what to do if he gets the urge to poke (and yes, masturbation is part of my sex-ed programme):

1) He will not use a condom and he may get a disease or knock up a girl
2) He will not tell me that he is having sex and leave his DNA in some public location or worse, in my car
3) He will rape some girl and say she asked for it
4) He will procure the services available between Geylang Lorong 6 to 24

Of course, I would totally give Ju the guilt trip about screwing around (with girls or guys, I'm no bigot), which parent won't? But I don't delude myself into thinking that my 12 year old would regard Mummy's Word as God's Decree, over and above video games, television, the internet, his buddies and pornography. That's just stupid and the only thing Ju should remember is that Mummy is no fool.