Unease: Life in Singapore Families

by Teo You Yenn

In Singapore, a loudly ‘pro-family’ society, why is work-life balance so elusive? And why are parents so uneasy? What accounts for this gap between the lived reality and ideal narrative of Singapore families?

Sociologist and bestselling author Teo You Yenn turns her eyes to the contours and rhythms of life inside families, exploring how ‘kiasu’ parents are made and investigating the ways in which inequality marks life in contemporary Singapore. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents from all walks of life, Unease examines how social structures, individual strategies and common practices come to produce Singaporean ‘cultures’ of doing family.

An incisive exposé of how the logics of hierarchy, competition and unequal worth infect ordinary people’s lives, Unease asks what these cost parents, children and the values we hold as a society. And what possibilities are there for living differently?

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2026

Reviews

[Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud) · Rating 5 out of 5]

TLDR whether you grew up here, got married here, or taught/studied in the public school system here, there is something for you. If you are a mother here, this is definitely for you. No intellectual thoughts from me when it's about lived experiences.

For notes taken at the 3 May 2026 book launch: https://www.instagram.com/p/DX4l30eEqTu/

I started this book knowing that although this is about parenting in Singapore, my experience would not be reflected in here (for good reasons). I'm not in any mummy chat groups because I straight up do not have friends in my age group who are also parents because almost everybody wants to remain childfree. Even at work, I'm the only parent. And I get it. They spent two decades in the education system and finally made it out with independence and financial freedom. They want to finally enjoy life, and why would they inflict this on another innocent? They tell me they see iPad babies everywhere. I see those kids too. People with children the same age as mine are 5-10 years older than me and I see this every day at the preschool or playgrounds. They have different values and already have social support systems in place. Many of them are SAHMs who don't have to work so they spend all day together, like a flock. I am envious but I have no idea where to find other mum-friends if I missed the window to go for prenatal yoga classes. But maybe it's a blessing that I don't experience direct pressure about sending my toddler to a 'better' preschool or enrichment classes.

What I did not expect was to see my own parents' experiences reflected even though it has been two decades since. So little has changed. They migrated from Hong Kong, but my upbringing ended up being very typically Singaporean Chinese because they anxiously copied what other parents did. Other parents sent their kids for abacus classes, piano lessons, Chinese tuition, Kumon, so they did too. Other parents obsessed about getting 'A' grades for Maths and Science, so they did too. I don't think they knew what they were doing, having no experience with the local education system themselves, they just knew they could not let their children-of-immigrants 'fall behind' so they made sure they did what their friends advised. I'm not sure it worked. And I'm not sure any of us, both parents and children, were content and fulfilled at any point of the journey. I can see why so few people want to do this after surviving childhood.

And then every single year we have to hear about the falling birth rate. I don't know anyone who actually cares because they're too busy trying to not die at work. Why is it always about babies being born and not about how to make life as adults in this country less unbearable? It seems pointless to be pro-birth but not pro everything else that makes the raising of children easier. This place is not actually pro-toddler, pro-children, or pro-family. Preschool teachers work long hours and are paid peanuts. Preschool waitlists are crazy long. Remote work is being phased out. Formula milk is insanely expensive. The primary school balloting system is.. I don't even have the words for this. Do we want more babies born because we value children and see the task of raising them to be an immense privilege, to protect them as the most vulnerable members of society, or are they valuable insofar as they will eventually grow up to become workers generating shareholder value for CEOs, to become fodder for the machine? Children are not cattle but why do they feel like they are? Even in a zoo, when the animals don't reproduce, the first thing to do is to fix the environment, not incentivise the animals with food or toys. People just don't feel secure and no amount of gaslighting will work. They are stressed about feeding themselves, let alone a completely helpless being that will hinder their ability to earn a livelihood. Right now, the equation is Having Kids = Income/ Mental Health/ Freedom in Peril. Of course people are uneasy. This unease is a gut feeling that not all is right, and people are listening to this feeling. No one can blame them.

Supplementary reading:
• 'Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution' by Adrienne Rich
• 'Every School a Good School' by Ng Ziqin
• 'Off Centre' and 'Those Who Can't, Teach' by Haresh Sharma
• and of course, 'This Is What Inequality Looks Like' by Teo You Yenn

[Cedric Chin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly remarkable. I thought this would be a book about parenting in Singapore. It was only at the ~60% mark that I realised that was a headfake. It becomes clear as the book progresses that this is a wholesale critique of Singaporean society — the way the state has set it up, combined with some broadly observed traits of capitalistic systems (all countries with capitalistic systems suffer from some work-life tension, also inequality), coupled with the consequences of social engineering decisions made decades ago. (Social engineering as a term has fallen out of fashion, but TYY reminds us that this was indeed done in Singapore in the 60s through the 80s.)

I will admit that while the societal critique is powerful and TYY accomplishes her goal of teaching us sociological analysis (as she says is one of her goals in her ST interview), if you are a parent, the most useful chapter might be chapter 4. (That’s the one on gender roles in parenting, and the deep costs it imposes on the mother).

TYY’s thesis is that inequality causes parenting to be an extremely fraught, highly unpleasant affair in Singapore. This is regardless of class (which is consistent with the government’s observation that monetary costs is not the prime mover for willingness to have more kids) and tied to education and gender roles in very complicated ways. It is an ambitious argument. If true, it goes some way to explain the broad decline in TFR in the developed world.

A layered book. I have some critiques but I’m still thinking them through. Anyway it doesn’t matter for this review; read the book.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read because the language is so straightforward and void of the jargon one might expect academics to have. Similar to her first book, Teo You Yenn looks at another aspect of inequality - this time that of family and meritocracy - through the eyes of anecdotes and interviews. I liked how she made her arguments on specific topics like gendered work norms, policy choices, and this paragraph struck me as beautifully written but sobering:

"That is the metaphorical sound of people being the contradictions and tensions in everyday life: family should be a happy place but there is no time to enjoy it; work should be secondary but money from work is familial duty; children should "learn through play" and develop "holistically" but still need to take exams; kids are the highest priorities but some of their care must be outsourced; every school is a good school but some are better than others."

And the list goes on. We live in a highly contradictory society where people are constantly at odds with their common sense and policy.

[Ning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book that interrogates the widening gap between Singapore’s purported pronatalist stance and the harsh, practical realities of "doing" family. Much of the tension boils down to education. While politicians often nag parents to be less kiasu, TYY reminds us that culture is not innate but rather "forged under specific structural conditions." It is easy to say a parent can simply choose to be more "relaxed," yet there is a constant, agonising friction between the desire to give our children a happy childhood and the perceived duty to support them as they navigate the System.
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Ethical agency should not be thought of as merely an individual capacity or quality. It is something one truly has only when one's choices and values, when exercised, are also legible to others in the larger social context. That is, it is not good enough to say that people can do whatever they want, can go ahead and exercise their own rules even if against the grain ('no one is stopping you'; 'it's up to the individual'). True ethical agency is possible only when those choices, those values, and such lives have a dignified space to exist—acknowledged with respect, if not empathy—within a society.

[Subra Nara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always found Teo You Yenn's (TYY) writing to be approachable, heartfelt and straightforward. And this was no different.

I think the biggest strength of Unease lies in its ability to cohesively sew a narrative thread across the personal stories heard from other parents, experiences that echo similar conversations that we've had in our lives with friends and family members. In all of these chats about raising a family in Singapore, there is often a bubbling sense of discontentment, an internal monologue which whispers that something is not quite right about the way things are set up in our society.

Yet our response is often to interpret this unease as a sign of our ungratefulness. How dare we question a society that has world-leading test scores, high standards of living and social mobility? If we are stressed out as a parent, then we should simply worry less about our kids and not be so kiasu, right?

The faustian bargain of a national narrative that emphasizes individual choices as the defining meritocratic pillar of your self-worth is that while you can claim that your successes are the result of your own hard work, so are your failures. If you don't succeed within the confines of Singapore Inc., it is your fault for not having tried enough/made the ‘wrong’ choices/'escaped' to move overseas. And when the success/failure in question is your child, how can you not take their result in national examinations as an indictment of your ability as a parent?

Teo's analysis makes the (somewhat controversial but shouldn't be) claim that parents don't make choices about their children in a vacuum and their agentic capacity is greatly constrained by the competitive sorting of the Singapore education system, a race that starts from as young as 18 months old. Teo doesn’t absolve the choices of parents who fill their children’s timetable with tuition and enrichment classes in the educational arms-race, but suggests that we need examine the social structures and policies that led to this point. It's one thing to say "you have the agency to not to send your kid to tuition." It's another to actually do that, especially when your kid's future is at stake.

“Kiasu parents are not born, they are made”, says Teo, a premise that is sure to rankle some feathers. If parents of all social classes seem to come to the same conclusion that giving up their individual aspirations and signing their children up for tuition is the only real option for them to have a fighting chance, then perhaps its worth asking serious questions about why the governmental narrative of happy families is so cognitively dissonant from the actual lived experiences on the ground.

There’s also often a tendency by policy makers and those of a higher socio-economic status to dismiss individual stories and outframe it as exceptions to the norm. Our obsession with data driven and discrete evidentiary metrics also mean any kind of individual stories are rebutted with “ok but this is your story, where is your data?”

Additionally, parents may not have the right economic or political language and can only draw from their own lives when they explain frustrations with the system. As a result, their experiences are far too often ignored as “over complaining” and “taking our government for granted”. What Teo does here brilliantly is to scaffold these individual stories with plenty of data and give them the collective rigour that cannot simply be ignored as “kopitiam talk” or “parental gossip” but must be accepted as symptoms which indicate a larger systemic problem.

When so many individual stories across different backgrounds utilise the same type of language, express similar frustrations and lament their inability to freely dislodge from social mores about what parenting is like in Singapore, motherhood statements and glib platitudes about the joy of family just doesn’t cut it. As the government assembles the umpteenth taskforce to figure out how to increase our total fertility rate and encourage more families to bear children, Teo’s book could not be more timely. The only question is if the powers that be are prepared to hear the “hard truths” undergirding the parental experience in Singapore and take decisive action.

[Alan Tao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely enough about a book subtitled "life in Singapore families", my biggest critique of this book was that it did not feel specific enough to Singapore.

TYY's main argument in this book is that inequality is one of the main causes of the unease in Singapore families. Singapore families feel unease as their realities of family life clash with the ideals that are espoused by the state and in the popular imagination - family life is meant to be peaceful and fulfilling yet can feel stressful and oppressive, work is meant to be secondary, a means to an end to support the family yet often feels fundamental to a parent's role as a provider, family is meant to elevate and complete one as a person yet simultaneously demands the sacrifice of one's own personhood to function. Fundamentally, one of the big causes of this unease is the understanding that one has to raise children to be sorted into an extremely hierarchical and unequal world. These are all keenly observed insights that are quite frankly almost universal to the developed (and some developing) world. A quick glance at news and polls across any rich country will show these to be similar unease felt by parents all over.

TYY also delves into some of the Singapore-specific pressures which exacerbates these feelings of unease - the way the education system creates and reinforces sorting and hierarchy, the specific ways in which government policies reproduce gendered parental roles, and the ways different classes struggle in raising their children in response to inequality. The contradictions between these pressures and the official "pro-family" rhetoric of the Singapore state is concisely laid out - yet I felt that TYY could have delved much deeper into explaining why these policies exist in such specific configurations in Singapore. These, after all, are the Singapore-specific patterns of unease that the book is about. While discussed briefly and indirectly, an accounting of how Singapore's political economy and place in the world economy produces such policy configurations would in my opinion have strengthened this book's analysis of the unease present specifically in Singapore parents.

Nevertheless, this is a very well written and approachable book about what is becoming one of the largest global issues of the 21st century, and should be read by anyone interested in how our societies function. There are many footnotes explaining Singapore specific terminology like HDB and PSLE (we are a nation in love with acronyms) so non-Singaporeans will find this book easy to understand as well.

[Trang Ngo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book during my first trip to Singapore, where I spent four days wandering through its diverse neighborhoods - from the vibrant streets of Chinatown and Little India to the quiet charm of Tiong Bahru and Joo Chiat, even into the local HDBs and bustling hawker centers like Maxwell and Golden Mile. Walking through Kampong Glam, Tanglin, and Nassim, I began to sense the country’s pulse: a generally incredible quiet, a seamless efficiency, and a deep-rooted discipline. It felt profoundly safe, yet there was a quiet realization that nothing "out of the crowd" was ever supposed to happen. This predictability is both a blessing and a constraint. I bought Unease because I wanted to understand the internal reality behind this perfect order.

Teo You Yenn’s Unease is a courageous challenge to the efficiency-driven narrative of Singapore. As a Vietnamese reader, I felt a strong connection to her analysis of a society that prioritizes the "most efficient trajectory" at the cost of internal peace.

The book captures the silent FOMO and the rigid social orbits that define the transition from Third World to First. While the takeaways were largely what I anticipated, the book’s strength lies in its ability to give a name to the invisible anxieties of Singaporean residents, especially mothers. It is an essential read for anyone wanting to feel "seen" in an over-structured world and a hopeful first step toward systemic change.

[Jonathan Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book is one that presents more questions than answers, that is transformative. This book is that. Don’t let the title deceive you, it isn’t all about family, but it is an introspective look into Singapore’s basic building block - families, to discuss their role in our society shaped by the micro, meso and macro lenses and to discover the little things that warp public perception vs reality.

The last chapter brings everything together, showing the sharp contrasts between policies, perceptions and everyday life and invites us to think of what we need to right the inequality “a feature in our society”.

The book provides some suggestions, some directly going against “what we have been told” but this phrase from the book keeps ringing in my head - “What’s the economy for, anyway, if not to help us realize our vision of a good society”. The competitiveness that has brought us up as a small nation has contributed to the aloofness where we are united in following because we are considerate to ourselves and not others.

Ultimately the book generates discussion, discussion that I will bring to my friends and close ones to say the “unsaid but known” and to drive further thoughts for the idea of our collective future society

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

copying what i put down earlier

a few early thoughts on unease:

- public sociology at its best takes everyday experience and links it to frameworks, connects the individual to the structural
-echoes of the first book: unpacking the cover of pro-family, how it’s caught up w the state’s intrusions/interventions and uncovering the discourse — it’s about individuals within families and leads back to wage work…
- the diagnosis is not new: the neoliberal, the k shaped economy
- our interventions are thus woefully under equipped because we are still carving up the pig into another way: work hours, on and off ramps. i haven’t processed it but the way it’s set up means taking apart we find an entirely different puzzle and diagnosis…

(also i wrote book review on this for my big big boss and i think i managed to both convey the main points as well as make it seem not too critical, though who is checking? i don’t think the clearance chain has read the book yet)

[henrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

A book that encourages you to reflect upon family life in Singapore, and the pains and challenges that come with parenting. Would not go so far as to say it was "eye-opening" as most of the things she pointed out weren't entirely unknown ideas, but a good reminder of inequalities that exist in SG, even if you don't agree entirely with the author's suggestions and views.

Alot of concepts were quite repetitive (perhaps to emphasise a point, but I personally felt that sometimes I was reading the same thing over). While thought-provoking, it was also a little incomplete, some ideas that were touched on and then dropped.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it. Reflected on my parents. Cried. 5/5.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

everything i’ve felt in the undercurrent, and so much more [full review awaits while i sit with the book a little longer!] [i did find this book a tinge more technical than TIWILL]

[Alethea · Rating 5 out of 5]

it was a very easy and engaging read. I enjoyed gaining perspectives on how singapore families live their lives, beyond my bubble