Finally, something worth reading in the Straits Times

May 12, 2010THE ST INTERVIEW

Want more babies? Fathers, please step up
Fairer policies and greater gender equity will boost S'pore's birth rate, says professor
By Tan Hui Yee, Correspondent
SINGAPORE fathers are the real losers when they abdicate child-rearing responsibilities to mothers. And the state, too, becomes much poorer for it, says noted Swedish international health professor and public statistics advocate Hans Rosling.
Singapore, he notes, vexes over its baby shortage because the situation threatens its economic survival. But it should be more concerned that its falling total fertility rate (TFR) shows poor gender equity, which is an indicator of social progress.
The 62-year-old academic from Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet, which awards the Nobel Prize for medicine, was in town recently to speak at the UBS Philanthropy Forum.
'A fertility rate of 1.23 children per woman indicates that life is not that optimal for young women in Singapore. You can gather from that that Singapore women have to make a choice, either to have children or to have an active professional career,' he says. Their inordinate sacrifice stems from the fact that would-be fathers here are not rising to the task of child-rearing, and state support for equal parenting roles is not adequate. In response, women are saying 'no' to babies.
Singapore, he notes, is a close cousin to Sweden in income and infant mortality rate. Yet both countries are moving in opposite directions when it comes to fertility rates, with the Swedish figure climbing to a 16-year high of 1.94 children per woman last year, while Singapore's dipped to a nadir of 1.23.
In fact, he says, Sweden is seeing more families with three children, and 'young couples would rather have a third child than a costly car'. The most likely reason for this contrast is the 'not very advanced' state of Singapore's gender relations, which lags behind its economic and social development, he says.
The fact that tens of thousands of live-in foreign domestic workers plug the gap here by doing housekeeping and looking after the children and elderly does not help, he charges. Their presence further stunts the development of gender relations.
It 'delays modernisation because the one who would have to deal with the domestic worker is the wife'. Married women still end up overseeing domestic work, which could have been equitably shared between husband and wife if such workers were not hired. Worse, men were also denied the transformative experience of bringing up their children. In the end, 'you will get fewer children', he says.
The other downside to relying on foreign domestic help is it swells the population of guest workers and deepens reliance on foreign labour. 'That makes Singapore more of a Gulf country than a West European country,' he says. One in three people in Singapore are now foreigners, while locals are outnumbered 10 to one in Dubai.
The Swedish way of boosting birth rate marries generous child-care facilities with a parental leave system designed to nudge fathers and mothers to take up equal parenting roles. Parents are entitled to 480 days of tax-funded parental leave between them, and couples who share the leave equally get a bonus payment.
Prof Rosling himself was among the first generation of fathers in Sweden who stayed home to look after his children more than 30 years ago. He took six months of leave each time to look after his three children because his wife Agneta, a hospital manager, threatened to throw him out of the house otherwise.
He recalls the pain of trying to convince his superiors to give him time off. 'It was very embarrassing having to ask the senior doctors if I could take half a year off. They said, 'Oh you can't do that, you will lose out in your career, you will be a failure and you will not get a job'. But I give better lectures now because of that experience. 'I am extremely happy for that.'
Times have changed so much in Sweden that his colleagues now send fathers reluctant to consume their parental leave to him for counselling. He says: 'Someone would come to me and say so and so is so career-oriented he won't stay home with his children. He would be taken into a room. We will tell him, 'You are stupid. Don't miss this'.' (**Daniel take note, I expect the same from you or you're OUT!)
It used to be said that advanced economies and a high TFR were mutually exclusive. Not any more. He notes a global trend of many high-income countries showing it is possible to reverse the decline in fertility rates. Australia, for example, which ranked seventh out of 109 countries in gender empowerment in the United Nations' human development report last year, achieved a fertility rate of 1.97 in 2008, the highest since 1977.
But this reversal is not happening in Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and he suggests this is because they lag behind in gender equity. Fair gender policies, he states, are probaby policies. Sweden does not give tax concessions to husbands if their wives are housewives. This reduces the financial incentive - some say pressure - for women to drop out of the workforce to look after their children.

Low-income divorcees with children in tow are also entitled to housing subsidies in Sweden. This makes it easier for women who leave unhappy marriages. 'You then remarry someone you love, that you are willing to have more kids with, instead of with that bas***d you happened to marry the first time,' he says.
So what is his advice on Singapore's bid to achieve the demographer prescribed replacement rate of a TFR of 2.1? Stop being fixated with numbers and keep your eyes on the real end-goal, which is the well-being of people. 'Who would like to live at replacement level?' he asks. 'We like to live good lives. The aim of development is not a certain replacement level or carbon dioxide emission or GDP (gross domestic product) growth rates. These are just tools to achieve a good life that is also sustainable.'
Benchmarks of progress should change according to a country's stage of development, he says. They should also be broadened beyond economic indicators like GDP to capture a clearer picture of a country's progress and what it needs to do next.
'For countries already with high incomes, the indicators used to track their progress out of poverty are no longer that useful,' he says. Take life expectancy, for example. 'It's nice to live longer, but when you get old, it's more important how you are cared for and how you live. Life expectancy becomes irrelevant when you try to measure how well old people live. 'When you have a car, you have a decent house or apartment, you have the chance to travel - further economic growth is not as important as the atmosphere you have at the workplace, your family relations and whether the economic growth is sustainable in the long term. 'What was a good measure of progress two generations ago is no longer a good measure now.'
He turns back to his home country. 'In Sweden, child mortality is almost zero. Now, parents ask, what about the environment during childbirth? Can my husband be with me? Why are the walls of the delivery room so boring? Can't they be nicer?
'Sometimes, I think these people are terrible. Now that we have made deliveries so safe for them and allowed their husbands to be there, they start to complain about the colour of the walls.
'But the thing is, that's what people want. They say it's the most important day of their lives. So we have to look into not only mortality rates and waiting times, but also other dimensions of the health service.'
Such is the nature of development that each stage of progress throws up new forks in the road, and some of these paths are not measurable with existing tools. For most people though, it still boils down to the same thing - figuring out how to 'create a society that is truly sustainable - socially, demographically and environmentally', he says.
And that future, he notes, can always include more babies.