One child is better than none, says study on preferences

A NEW study has found that citizens prefer having one child to not having any.

However, they do not prefer having two or more children – over just one child – if other areas of family life they value are not fulfilled, said Professor Jean Yeung, the study’s principal investigator for Singapore, one of eight countries involved in the study.

More than 22,000 people in eight countries were polled online about their family ideals in an era of unprecedented fertility decline in developed countries.

The countries are Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Italy, Spain, Norway, the United States and urban China, which refers to Chinese cities.

Some 3,500 people in Singapore, including both married people and singles, were interviewed from December 2021 to February 2022.

Singaporeans’ preference for one child is similar to how respondents across the other seven countries felt, said Prof Yeung, the director of social sciences at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences.

This preference is surprising, as past research has shown that there is a two-child norm in Singapore, she said.

The study comes as preliminary data showed that Singapore’s resident total fertility rate (TFR) fell below 1.0 for the first time in 2023 to 0.97, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Indranee Rajah said on Feb 28.

The TFR refers to the average number of babies each woman would have during her reproductive years. The 0.97 figure places Singapore among countries with the lowest TFR globally.

Commenting on the study’s findings, Dr Tan Poh Lin, senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, said that a shift away from the two-child norm in Singapore towards smaller family sizes would certainly dent efforts to boost its total fertility rate.

Dr Tan, who is not involved in the study, added: “To promote having a second or third child, families need more assurance that having siblings doesn’t disadvantage existing children in terms of parental time and opportunities.”