SINGAPORE – Across three years of interviewing 92 Singaporean parents for her new book, best-selling author Teo You Yenn listened to their aspirations and exasperations, their stories of survival and falling behind.
In the end, it was what they did not say that pained the sociologist.
Rarely did parents speak spontaneously about what they enjoyed or admired in their kids. In fact, most of them framed their children as a narrow set of educational problems in need of a solution.
It was this discomforting pattern that led the 51-year-old mother to question in her new book: “What kind of pro-family regime is this, really?”
Teo, an associate professor and provost’s chair in sociology at Nanyang Technological University, tells The Straits Times in an exclusive interview ahead of the release of Unease: Life In Singapore Families (2026): “I hope, when people read it, they feel an ache. Parenting shouldn’t feel that way and childhood shouldn’t feel that way. That is one of the big costs of having society be structured the way it is.”
In 2018, the year that the film Crazy Rich Asians flaunted ultra-rich Singapore to the world, Teo cast her eyes on life in rental flats in her book This Is What Inequality Looks Like. It sold 43,000 copies and spent 80 weeks on The Straits Times’ bestsellers list.
In 2026, as Singapore’s total fertility rate sinks to a historic low of 0.87 and the Government overhauls high-stakes examinations, Teo reckons Singaporeans are ready to look past the veneer of the state’s pro-family rhetoric.
Her diagnosis of the current malaise is a pervasive state of niggling “unease” that afflicts parents despite a world-class education system. It is a feeling that is often dismissed as irrational, Teo writes, yet is consistent throughout her interviews.
In her book, parenting is a relentless variation on the same theme – enrolling children for pre-school phonics, assigning homework, researching enrichment centres, waiting idly outside tuition centres, volunteering for priority entry to primary schools, attending mathematics workshops themselves and even quitting one’s job to school a child.
Unless she prodded, Teo would not hear parents talk about their own leisure activities at all.
The burden might fall more heavily on mothers and lower-class families. However, Teo notes how even upper-middle-class families have not used their money to buy more leisure time, but instead shuttle their kids around the $1.8 billion private tuition industry.
“Although the word ‘inequality’ is not in the title, in many ways, the book is another attempt on my part to show that unequal societies harm everybody living in that society,” she says.
