SPEECH BY DIRECTOR OF CFPR, PROFESSOR JEAN YEUNG
OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE CENTRE FOR FAMILY AND POPULATION
RESEARCH AND CONFERENCE ON SINGAPORE FAMILIES AND POPULATION
DYNAMICS
28 APRIL 2015 | 10AM
Miss Grace Fu
Minister, Prime Minister’s Office;
Second Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, and
Second Minister for Foreign Affairs
Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, President, National University of Singapore
Professor Brenda Yeoh, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Distinguished guests, Friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen
Good morning!
Thank you all for coming to support the Centre for Family and Population Research.
Family and population issues have always been close to my heart and of personal importance to
me throughout my career. Thirty some years ago when I was a graduate student, newly married, I
was struggling with the challenge between starting a family and work. I decided to write my
dissertation on a sequential decision-making model for female labor force participation and
fertility. By the time I had finished my degree, I had a son, a daughter, and a full time job. To
assume that achieving a work-life balance had been easy would of course be naïve. Key to my
ability to start a family and maintain a fulfilling job was that I had a flexible work environment.
Another one of my secret weapons was a collaborative husband who has been a co-pilot of mine
in this journey. We were also surrounded by loving grandparents, uncles and aunts, good
childcare, a supportive school system, and a caring community. And when we were in the U.S.,
my children grew up in Chinese school and Chinese church, which were very important parts of
our lives at the time. Without any of these, it would have been very difficult to keep the family
together and pursue our careers at the same time. This is not to say that we did not lose our sanity
from time to time. I realize you are not here today to view my family album. Thank you for
indulging me in letting me share with you my pride. My point is that it takes a village to start and
grow a family.
As my children grew older, I began to examine how parenting behavior and family
resources shape children’s development, father’s family roles, and challenges young people face
in transitioning into adulthood. Nowadays, I study retirement plan, intergenerational relations
and transfer, and elderly care issues. These works show that each life stage is consequential to
the next. Early life experience, in particular, has a defining and long lasting influence in shaping
one’s later life chances and well-being (be it in education, health, marriage, or earnings).
Hence, for example, to understand aging issues, we need to look at life circumstances well before
age 60. Moreover, these works also show that lives of multiple generations are tightly linked.
Grandparents’ financial and human capital, for example, have a direct impact on grandchildren’s
education. To adequately understand family behavior, one needs to take a long-term view and
situate an individual in his or her family network as well as the macro-economic and policy
contexts. My work also shows that family factors largely accounted for racial achievement gap
in the U.S.
It was gratifying to see that some of this research has made a policy impact on changing
the focus of public assistance to children in poverty to allocating more resources toward early
childhood rather than to later stages, and on the launch of the national fatherhood initiative in the
U.S and fatherhood movement in several countries including the Dads for Life movement in
Singapore. My experiences have taught me that rigorous, empirically-based research can
contribute to effective public policies.
I am a believer in strong families. Research shows clearly that children do better when
they grow up with two parents, everything else being equal. Longitudinal studies also show that
married people are happier, healthier and wealthier, everything else being equal. In real life,
however, everything is not equal. People live under different circumstances with varying
opportunities and constraints. Getting married or keeping a family intact may not be attainable or
desirable for everyone. Modern societies have evolved to demand many institutional, attitudinal,
and behavioral adjustments. In the 1940s, George Murdock surveyed 250 societies and found a
wide variety of family types, but one common basic socioeconomic unit across all societies:
family. Family organizes populations into more efficient units to maintain social order, transmit
resources and values, fulfill emotional needs, and regenerate the population.
There is no denial that never married people, single-parent families, childless families,
and step families and other types of families are growing in Asia. My recent work shows that the
fastest growing family type in many countries around the world is that of the one-person
household, consisting of not just the elderly, but also the young single, married, and divorced
individuals. In some countries, this type of household accounts for more than one third of the
total households. In Singapore, it is 12%. Yet, those who live alone are not outside of the family
system. Most of them are connected to their families but live alone for various reasons. It is
important to look at relationship among family members rather than only the structure of family.
These new family forms need to be understood and responded to lest we risk losing the
opportunity to build strong families and a cohesive, dynamic society. As we move into the brave
new world in the rest of the 21st century, there will be no shortage of more new family forms. A
lesson can be learned from Japan’s experience - resistance to adaptation could lead to the
reduction in population and economic stagnation.
Young adults and families today are under stress, experiencing much financial and social
pressure. Research shows that youth unemployment rates are 2 to 3 times higher than adult
unemployment rates in most countries. Young people today need more support to enhance their
human capital. They need affordable housing and childcare. They need more gender-equitable
work and home environments so that they can be fulfilled, happy, and productive members of
society. Similarly, many older adults who are vulnerable to financial or psychological stress need
to be supported too.
Challenges may be particularly intense in Asia as this region experiences socioeconomic
and technological changes that occur much more rapidly than they did in Western societies in a
much more diverse cultural contexts. Most Asian countries also tend to have much weaker
social safety nets. Hence, findings in other countries may not be directly transferrable to Asian
societies. With about one-third of the population remain never married by the age of 40 in
Singapore now, as in several East Asian countries, familial support network for these individuals
will be nearly non-existent when they age in a few decades, demanding the need to strengthen
the public safety nets in the country. There is much to be learned about how to best manage
family and population in different contexts.
CFPR is dedicated to fostering an interdisciplinary understanding of the trends,
determinants, and consequences of family and population changes, particularly in Asia, and to
bridge research and policies. We adopt a life course and international comparative approach in
achieving our goals through research, training, and mentoring. We now house 27 researchers
from different disciplines.
CFPR plans to carry out faculty-initiated projects on comparative studies across different
Asian countries. Projects will seek to understand and manage family stress in different life
stages, retirement plans and long-term care for older adults, intergenerational relations and
exchange of time and money; trends and consequences of changes in family structure and values,
how changes in human capital affect labor market outlook and health care needs in aging Asia,
and more. Regular seminars, workshops, international conferences, and visiting fellowships will
bring diverse communities together.
For training, we will offer short courses on research methods, practice, and special topics
on demography and family. This program not only serves the academic communities, but also
enhances the human capital of employees in the government and private sectors, consistent with
the spirit of the Skillsfuture program that the Singapore government has recently launched. Our
inaugural programme will start in just a few weeks – from mid-May through July – covering topics
such as social care for older adults, social research methods, evaluation research, and computerassisted analysis of qualitative data.
What we do and can accomplish in the next few years depends entirely on how successfully
faculty members, government, and communities can come together to support the centre.
For CFPR’s inaugural conference, we focus on Singapore families and population
dynamics. Singapore is a land of immigrants and vibrant ethnic diversity. Fifty years ago,
families of different ethnicities came to this land in search of a better life and with the mission to
build a nation. The population structure in the beginning looked like this back then, with the
different colors representing the multiple ethnic groups (show pyramid), each having a large
proportion of children and young people. The fertility rates dropped drastically between the 60s
and 70s for all ethnic groups, and that changed the population structure for Singapore residents
significantly (show 1970, 1990, and 2010 pyramids). As Singapore’s resident population has
aged, from 1970 to 2010, the nonresidents have grown from 3% to about a quarter of the total
population in 2010.
There has always been a relatively high proportion of interracial marriages in Singapore
from the early years, and that rate has increased to about 20% of all marriages in 2013 (show
charts). In recent years, about 40% of marriages involve a foreign partner, and 30% of citizen
births have a foreign parent. The percentage of intermarriages can be seen as a barometer of the
fluidity of social boundaries that is beneficial for social cohesion. The increasing incidence of
interracial marriages presents new opportunities but also challenges as Singapore strives to
become a global society.
Moving forward, Singapore must decide what the size, shape, and color of its population,
and its basic social economic unit – the family – will look like. Having a vibrant population
comprised of diverse, well-functioning families with shared visions will propel Singapore into a
dynamic next 50 years. There are many family and population issues and innovative policies
unique to Singapore that need to be examined so that findings can be used to guide future public
policies.
Today’s conference is a testimony of our commitment to this country as we come
together to discuss these pressing issues. Let me thank all the presenters and Chairs for their
contributions, the three co-sponsoring units, DVO, and your participation. Last but not least, I
want to thank the CFPR steering committee members, all the volunteer students and researchers,
and our staff, Ms. Ler Soh Wah, Gi Pasaraba and Valerie Yeo for their devotion and talents to
put this event together. Again, for CFPR to grow, we need all of your support. Thank you, and I
hope you have a productive and enjoyable conference today.
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Jason Yin, Mu Zheng, Hu Shu for their excellent
research assistance.