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, Sociology, Politics

264 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2026

Reviews

[Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud)]

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]

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.

[Jane]

yet again with the preachy and moralistic tone. this book is one exaggeration after another.

the author is literally camping outside hdb tuition centres to interview waiting parents, and then she makes the conclusion that most parents are sending their kids for 'bang-for-buck' classes and claims that 'the whole system will collapse without tuition'. tyy, i have a suggestion, why don't you wait in a hospital and interview patients about their lifestyles to draw conclusions about the general population's health? or wait outside the tyy fan club meeting to conclude that all singaporeans share your views?

the craziest point was when she concluded that parents care so much about their kids' academics instead of their character, and parents only ask each other about their kids because they want to suss out the other kids' academic performance. her evidence: when she asked parents about their kids, they rarely offered expressions of joys, talents and strengths of their kids, instead, they talked about their kids' academic performance and schooling. ??? that's because you are a rando asking questions outside a tuition centre and parents are just sticking to safe facts??? where is the academic rigour??? you are entitled to your opinions, but don't masquerade this as research please.

in the last chapter about "virtues", "ethics", "equality", "common good" etc. etc. (with 'air-quotes'), she claimed that our current society judges parents and doesn't give them a dignified space to exist with their choices if they act based on their principles (i.e. parents are being forced by culture to send their kids for tuition, and we are out here SHAMING them implicitly if they don't). please. i recommend Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" for starters. sorry that life is a struggle for existence and people are trying their best for their kids in the most primal ways instead of taking the virtuous road. sociology is not a real science.

here's a quote i'll end with:
"We rarely have the space to ask why: why is life organised to prioritise work, money, 'the economy'? Why do children need to be able to read before primary school? Why is Mathematics a main tool for differentiating and categorising students? Why are educational credentials a main determinant of salaries? Why do we attach unequal value to people based on credentials and/or wealth?"

stop asking leading questions and pretending they are profound. to answer the first four, because why not? because food, housing, transport, healthcare, power and much of human progress simply do not come from vibes, leisure or singing kumbaya under the tree. society is built on science, industry and labour. and to the last question, you are the one who is devaluing humans to money, not us. speak for yourself.


1 star for chapter 4 about gendered unease.
-1000000 for the rest. not because i disagree with the points, but because this could have been a 500-word fb post. sad for the trees who had to have such banalities printed on their dead bodies.

[Danielle]

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.

[Khairul Amiruf]

Back by popular demand, after I was blown away from her first book 'This is What Inequality Looks Like', Teo You Yenn is back with another book that explores the theme of inequality, but this time through the lens of mental health.

Finally finished this book just in time for the update on National Day Rally.

This book explores (and maybe implores readers who may be citizens of Singapore or just readers living in Singapore to think about), the disconnect between Singapore’s official "pro-family" state narrative and the stressful, high-pressure reality of day-to-day parenting. Let me summarize by each chapter and provide my thoughts about them.

Chapter 1: A World-Class City, A Paradox of Unease

Singapore markets itself as a safe, prosperous, pro-family environment, yet parents experience persistent feelings of exhaustion, insecurity, and friction.

For example, from an “outside in” perspective, one might look at Singapore as a world class city, where infrastructure is built and in place for everyone to get by enough such that they do not have to worry about their basic needs and can focus on thriving. This perspective or “image” can be shaped by our high GDP, low crime rate, frequent state subsidies… I mean they all sound like tasty carrots. When in actual fact, there is a divorce between reality and the ideal rhetoric. If you ask many people presently about their lives in Singapore, many would share that they do not feel relaxed or secure. Instead, they describe feeling chronically exhausted, anxious, and off-kilter.

This unease is not a personal failing but an expected outcome of the structural environment. Society often tells anxious parents: "You need better work-life balance," "Stop being so kiasu," or "Take a break." But one should argue that parents aren't anxious because they have bad attitudes. They are anxious because the system rewards extreme hyper-vigilance and heavily penalizes slipping up.

Chapter 2: Doing Family: The Texture of Unease

When Teo You Yenn used the term “doing family” here, she’s trying to emphasize that a family is not just a static structure (parents + children), but a continuous, active process created through daily labor.

In this chapter, she shed a light on the state’s positioning of the nuclear family as the primary safety net for economic survival and care. This offloads massive structural responsibilities onto households, turning family life into an intense management operation.

The famous saying that every Singaporean knows by heart: “No one owes you a living”, and in this sense, not even the government. And that state support is structured to be minimal or conditional, such that you have to go through so much hoops and hurdles and only after the state has decided that you do not have a support system in place, then maybe they might offload you first to NGOs and such organizations before even stepping in to provide support.

In a way, this kinda shapes parents lives as an unending series of administrative tasks, having to navigate and juggle basic everyday needs like eldercare, preschool arrangements, and work commitments. She shows how families constantly feel forced to sacrifice personal well-being, leisure, and sleep just to maintain baseline stability.

The author highlights quotes where parents frame their continuous self-sacrifice as normal, showing how the "pro-family" label masks the heavy burden of individual self-reliance.

Some internal thoughts: how much must you really want kids to go through all these struggle? And I do hear from many of my friends at present, and I’m sure this is common among young adults around the same stage of life. That once you have kids, your lives stops. Careers of mothers to “be put on hold”, vacations to be more family friendly, or even a pause on the thought of a vacation even, more unending household chores, then maybe you’ll also be caught with your ageing parents that you have to care for. The orientation toward the future is not driven by optimism, but by fear.

The constant exhaustion parents feel isn't due to poor time management. It is the inevitable result of a system that offloads the heavy lifting of social welfare onto individual households, leaving parents to manage systemic burdens entirely on their own.

Chapter 3: Inside Families: The Making of Kiasu Parents

I thought this chapter kinda encapsulates what it is to be Singaporean really well. It is hilarious in a sense that I see it all around me, and I’ve always asked myself why are Singaporeans the way that we are? This chapter helps provide a perspective on the shaping of Singaporean’s behaviour.

Hyper-competitive parenting (often labeled ‘kiasu’ or fear of losing out) is not an irrational cultural flaw. Popular discourse often blames parents for the intense pressures of the education system, dismissing their behavior as an irrational cultural obsession with winning.

But if we do not win, we lose. And it is indeed a zero sum game here in Singapore. The “losers” form the base of the social hierarchy and only the elite few gets to make decisions for the state. And then your lives will be continually be dictated by them. Unless you leave. This kinda repeats the system the Rome “used” back in the day.

Might this be too reductive in thinking? Maybe. But in Singapore, there really isn’t much room to “fail” as the structure or narrative is sort of written in stone for you just as soon as you exit your mother’s womb. Or maybe I’m being too reductive. Please criticize me and provide your opinions. Would love to hear them.

The whole kiasu behaviour is ultimately a rational, calculated response to high-stakes institutional systems like national streaming and meritocratic sorting.

Through interviews with middle-class parents, Teo You Yenn shows how early the pressure starts. Parents describe feeling compelled to enrol young children in tuition, enrichment classes, and specialized preparation, even when they personally dislike doing so. They do this because the education system clearly rewards early tracking and severely penalizes late bloomers. The author demonstrates that parents behave defensively to protect their children from getting left behind in a rigid meritocracy.

And the funniest thing of all is that, if we celebrate so loudly that we have a “World Class” education system (on par with the Finnish), why do many parents do not trust the system? And instead, send them for countless hours of tuitions and enrichment classes. Should parents just disenrol their kids from formal institution and instead enrol them into tuitions then, since many of these “tuition centres” are formerly qualified MOE teachers even and they are in tune with the syllabus? Would that help them free up time for essential “play”? Many parents feel that they have “no choice” but to send the kids to tuition fearing that one less hour spent at tuition equate to an hour behind among their peers in terms of academic rigour, and essentially surrendering their arms in this arms race.

Chapter 4: Culture x Structure in the Making of Gendered Unease

To understand this topic better, one can look back to the past of how society was structured. And another, the achievement that Singapore achieved: from third world to first in a single generation thanks to Mr LKY, and then the asian economic boom. Singapore progressed very quickly during these years, but the social and structural norms prevail.

The traditional Asian values:

Men were framed historically as the primary breadwinners and economic anchors, expected to focus on formal, full-time production.
Women were assigned the role of primary emotional and domestic nurturers, responsible for maintaining the home, raising children, and providing care.

which forms the nuclear family structure. In embodying this structure and trying to stay true to “Asian” values instead of pandering to Western values and norms, the economic polices that were legislated and constructed circles around this.

On the policy level:

Working Mother’s Child Relief (WMCR) — tax relief scheme specifically for tax-paying working mothers who are married, divorced, or widowed. Fathers cannot claim it.
Foreign Domestic Worker Levy Relief — allowed working mothers (and only working mothers) to claim an income tax relief.
Grandparent Caregiver Relief — tax relief of $3,000 for working mothers whose non-working parents or parents-in-law look after their young children.
Parental Leave Disparities — Paid Maternity Leave was guaranteed for up to 16 weeks, while Paternity Leave was introduced much later and started at just 1 to 2 weeks (and was only made mandatory for employers more recently).

From this alone, one can see that the state implicitly signals that caregiving is fundamentally a woman's deficit to solve—whether by sacrificing her own career, calling in her mother, or hiring a foreign helper. Cues in the clip of Anthony Bourdain: Anthony Bourdain Singapore Segment.

"Bourgeois! Living off the labor of the oppressed underclass."

And at the same time, this reinforced the idea among society and the individuals living in it. For example, the idea of domestic labour like washing dishes or cooking; tracking school deadlines, managing domestic helper workflows, monitoring child health, coordinating eldercare appointments, all fall onto the women and not the men. “Men are supposed to go out and make money and put bread on the table.”

These aren’t only physical tasks as it involves cognitive mental load to juggle the multiple activities throughout the day, month, year. At the same time, they can’t fully focus on executing well in their careers.

Mothers recount feeling forced to make quiet compromises: opting out of high-visibility projects, passing on promotions, switching to lower-paying roles, or leaving the workforce entirely. The author demonstrates that when workplace expectations demand complete availability and domestic expectations demand constant oversight, women are trapped in a system where fulfilling one role inherently compromises the other.

Gender inequality inside households remains steep because state policies, workplace demands, and cultural expectations implicitly rely on mothers as primary caregivers.

This chapter opened up my eyes like Cyclop’s third eye. I humbly apologise a little, for being slightly more fortunate and privileged of having been birthed as a male. But with this enlightenment, I will do my best not to reinforce this stereotypes where I can.

Chapter 5: Parenting and Class: The Costs of Inequality

Of all the chapters, this one felt most relevant. The situations described were uncomfortably familiar.

While anxiety affects almost all parents across the board, social class determines what resources parents can use to cushion that stress, leaving low-income families with far fewer buffers.

Teo You Yenn contrasts wealthier households who are able to use private tuition, domestic helpers, and flexible finances to manage stress with working-class households. Money allows these families to outsource routine chores and targeted educational prep, effectively buying back personal time and reducing daily friction. Many high income household can even afford the multiple extra curricular for their kids to explore while they’re young to learn about the world, and at the same time, themselves.

Lower-income parents describe feeling double pressure: they face the same intensive parenting standards expected by schools and society, but lack the money and time to buy the necessary help. They cannot afford private tuition, private transport, or domestic help. When a child falls behind in school or an elderly relative falls ill, working-class parents cannot simply spend money to resolve the issue. Instead, they must absorb the physical and temporal cost directly, leading to severe chronic exhaustion.

Instead of being able to choose paths based on interest or talent, financial limitations force these families into narrow defensive choices as they too have witnessed the high-stakes demands of the meritocratic system. Daily decisions are dictated entirely by immediate economic constraints (such as paying bills or working extra shifts), which prevents parents and children from investing in long-term potential.

The author illustrates how structural gaps turn the everyday demands of school and health into compounding crises for low-income families.

Chapter 6: How We Live Is Who We Become

This chapter pulls together the threads from earlier chapters to look at the broader societal cost of living under continuous pressure.

The current setup forces citizens to adopt narrow, hyper-individualistic coping strategies that weaken social solidarity and flatten the human experience. When a society relies on intense competition and private self-reliance to deliver security, people are trained to view every aspect of life as a transaction.

High-stakes meritocracy frames life as a zero-sum game. When parents feel that their child's success depends on another child falling behind, social trust breaks down. Ever had your auntie asking you or your mother during CNY visiting, “boy ah, how was your PSLE result?”, “What school are you going to?”. Though they might all sound harmless in nature, they are deeply insidious, either to gloat on their next sentence that their son obtained full marks, and will be going to RI. Have we discounted human lives so much that this brings us joy and happiness?

At the same time, across all families in Singapore, parents and youth continuously trade away current happiness, rest, and personal interests to secure hypothetical future stability. (Once, again, only the elite few is able to thrive in Singapore).

This relentless focus on benchmarks strips away the space for curiosity, play, and emotional connection, reducing family life to a series of strategic targets. Akin to running a business, hitting the many different KPIs along the way.

Teo You Yenn shares that real change requires moving away from pure market logic toward collective forms of care. And that true security comes from knowing that society supports everyone baseline, rather than leaving families to build private buffers against failure.

Though, she did not share how? And what if her “How” comes with even more unfair tradeoffs? But that does not mean we shouldn’t try.

My thoughts

I think this book is great in terms of shining a light on the lives of Singaporeans. In explaining, why we are the way that we are and how we respond to certain situations as a reflex.

I really do like her use of the ‘Supertree’ at Gardens by the Bay as a central sociological metaphor to explain how human behavior ("culture") is constrained and shaped by institutional engineering ("structure").

---


Metal Scaffolding (Structure): Represents state policies, economic models, tracking systems in education, housing rules, and workplace norms. These are rigid, deliberate, and engineered.
The Living Plants (Culture & Human Behavior): Represents how families live, how parents act, domestic habits, values, and the kiasu instinct.

The behaviour of Singaporeans and our “kiasu-ism” are not born out of a vacuum, but a response and an adaptation of lives to fit the rigid incentives, competitive employment, minimum welfare system. Our behaviour is an artificial growth conforming to an engineered skeleton. And when our natural desire yearns for rest, play, unhurried family time calls; we face the guilt, the sense of unease which collides with the boundaries of the structural system.

Teo You Yenn demonstrates that telling the plants to grow differently without altering the metal skeleton is an impossible demand. If society wants a different, healthier culture of family life, it must first redesign the structural scaffolding that dictates how people are forced to adapt.

[d9fqdfnka]

I do not think that the author managed to draw surprising insights from her interviews with parents. To put it another way, even many laypeople on online forums might be able to draw the conclusions she did. I was reading this at the same time as Dan Goodley's Introduction to Disability Studies (3rd edition), and in just a few pages he paints an incisive critique of neoliberalism and what it means for education. Unfortunately, I felt that Unease could not really link the theory to her data. That is not to disparage what the author does, as she challenges readers to imagine alternatives to the unease Singaporeans face in the final pages. She has succeeded in getting Singaporeans to bring this to discussions, discussions we sorely need.

I originally chose not to write a review because as a Singaporean, being bombarded by embodied knowledge about the subject on a daily basis, I felt there was too much to think about and too many emotions to grapple with.

The author addresses Singaporeans directly in this book, so it might be just a little strange for a foreigner to read this.

[aqilahreads]

felt unease reading unease 😰💦

personally quite a cheem read for me tbh :'-) it took me awhile to finish because i was rlly trying to absorb everything & honestly, i was trying my best to finish this one 😭 but i’m glad i still picked it up. ⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

i came across a review saying that reading this cemented her decision to not have kids lolol and somehow…..i kinda understood where she was coming from bc that was actually one of the feelings i had while reading this too 😭

there were moments where it felt a little preachy to me, though perhaps part of that comes from reading it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have kids. i found myself thinking about how differently some of these ideas might land if i were actually navigating parenthood myself.

but all in all, as much as i was already aware of many of the things discussed - the pressure, competition, inequality, the constant feeling of needing to do more and be more - i still felt like there was so much more that could be unpacked.

and maybe…...that was the point.

what stayed with me was this idea that there are different ways to be human. and somehow, i found myself thinking that this applies to families too. there isn't one right way to be a family, just as there isn't one right way to live a life.

perhaps what makes unease uncomfortable is that it makes you question the things we've grown so accustomed to accepting as normal.

a cheem read that took me awhile to get through, but one that definitely gave me quite a bit to think about. 🙇‍♀️💭

[K1c]

This was highly valuable in 3 ways:

1. It is an investigation of something hard to pin down in any place - its ambient environment. This is particularly true in a relatively moralistic and opaque society, where detail about what's going on in other lives doesn't come easy. Let alone from a voice which doesn't desperately want you to have kids.

2. It offers an elegant reading of the feelsbad nature of Singapore that nimbly weaves together structure and agency. It resists the national desire to atomise individual experiences, and 'collectivises' the problem by explicating the social costs of the way we live today as we hurdle into a prob worse future.

3. It establishes (births??) a generative concept. 'Unease' is a resonant way of articulating the ambivalence of living here. The text was probably too elementary/101 whenever it did theory. But fair enough, accessibility is a worthy goal. So giving rise to more questions than answers, you can imagine 'unease' as a concept being taken forward in many rich directions. For example, I would love a deep ethnography of one day in an uneasy life that teases out the contours of this genre of living.

[Esther]

i agree with all the other positive reviews on how this book brings a much needed perspective on the palpable tension and unease in singapore today. but beyond the insights shared, i am grateful for teo you yenn's time and effort in crafting this book, and her commitment to bringing her views and ideas to a wider audience, and building the type of society she wants to see.

there is so much personal and professional cost to embarking on this type of work, as she alludes to in a 2024 personal essay, and it's very admirable and commendable that despite the challenges involved she's decided to bring her scholarship and expertise to bear in service of enabling this public discourse about the unarticulated ideologies embedded in our society, how it affects everyone across class, gender, age divides, and the society we want to build and how to get there.

[Janne Hu]

TYY is doing important work for Singapore. in her clear and accessible writing, she uses the familiar feeling of ‘unease’/ discomfort/ ambivalence to probe the tensions in the representations (in ‘culture’, state narratives) and the lived experiences of family life (which are conditioned by real policies, institutions). it also seems like TYY is trying to teach Singaporeans the basics of social science - she often explains why a question is worth asking in the first place and then takes us through each step of her logic - which is a worthy endeavour towards building an engaged society.

most of the book is ostensibly about the challenges of parenting and family life in Singapore, but it is undergirded by TYY’s central preoccupation - inequality. i found her expansive definition to be very productive - inequality is not only about inputs and outcomes in terms (e.g. in resource distribution), but it is context, the way that ranking and competitive sorting are embedded in everyday interactions with people and institutions. based on state narratives (e.g. 2019 COS response to TYY’s TIWILL), inequality is conceived as discrete, concrete problems to be mostly addressed by subsidies and transfers. this is not wrong in itself but misses out on broader experiences structured by socioeconomic hierarchy, which are also deserving of policy thinking and space.

the conclusion propounds a version of society that is built on ethical action, community solidarity and respect for all regardless of conventional success. even though Singapore is swept along the global neoliberal capitalistic trends which further entrench inequality, i’m slightly optimistic. we know that ‘culture’ is not static, that policy positions can evolve; we must believe that individuals can participate in shaping the society we want.

[Subra Nara]

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.

[W]

Once again TYY has come up with a banger of a book which looks at Singapore society as a whole. There are so many parts of it that I would like to quote in my review but alas I have to return the library book and have not had time to go buy an actual physical copy myself.

As she rightly points out there are issues with how the Singapore society has evolved. Once upon a time, the daughter of a taxi driver could go to university and get a decent job, now I’m really not sure that can be done anymore.

Our leaders like to say we are meritocratic and pro family but don’t do anything to make it actually happen when increasingly we are no longer that way. Society is getting more and more fragmented but what are we actually doing to resolve the issue? We say we are pro family but in reality we are only pro family in a narrow sense, you have to be a straight couple and please make sure you have one boy and one girl. If you’re a woman you better make sure you belong to the higher SES so you can outsource some of the care work but even then you are expected to carry the majority of the load.

Previously when This Is What Inequality Looks Like there were a lot of criticisms from the government, this time round it seems there is radio silence. I’m not sure if they are busy digesting the book to come up with counterpoints or if they hope by keeping silent they won’t draw attention to the book and Singaporeans don’t read this book at all.

This is definitely a book that requires multiple readings so you have time to sit with the issues raised. Please read this if you have not done so yet.

[Ning]

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.
---
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.

[Jean]

I am always impressed at how well Teo analyses and arranges various stories of her interviewees into coherent themes, and digest and present it in an accessible way for laypersons like myself. I also appreciated how she challenged state narratives such as how kiasu parents are the ones exacerbating the “education arms race”, and unpacked how that scapegoats and provides an easy way out of an otherwise extremely interwoven and complex social phenomenon of unease. Another part I appreciated was her analysis of how women “folded down” their ambitions, aspirations, and selves to support their children and families, and what ethical agency looks like for them (and parents more broadly).

[Kathleen Bu]

Quotes that stayed with me:

1. “Everyday life is hectic and tense; life is stable but not quite secure; there is a pathway to follow but it does not always seem right; family is everything but family life feels off-kilter. The unease is subtle but persistent.”

2. “The picture I gathered of family lives is one dominated by labour— chores, tasks, checklists, schedules-and with scant room for play, rest, leisure, pleasure. It is also one where parents seem to bracket and suspend their own needs, aspirations, desires. The suspension of the self for children's potential and future was especially striking. Parents invoked this rhetoric with some frequency, referring to a shared script about parenting: sacrificing some of one's own happiness to enhance children's wellbeing is the right and expected thing to do. They expressed orientations towards the future: there was a sense that suffering in the now is acceptable, in exchange for some potential for a better life in the future. An orientation to the future might be aspirational, dreamy, about ambition and hope. But this is not the tone I observed. Instead, people's words were tinged with anxiety, worry, a look to the future more fearful than optimistic.”

3. “The Singapore story is frequently and repeatedly told as one of exceptionalism. Central to the exceptionalism narrative is that Singapore has successfully pursued economic growth and wealth-as 'the West' has—while maintaining a semblance of the best that 'traditional values' of'the East' or 'Asia' have to offer. Inside this box of 'best of East meets West' we find 'the family' as its most precious gem…Enough Singaporeans have been steered through idealised familial life pathways—from education to employment and accumulation of CPF savings, dating and heterosexual marriage to HDB flats, childbearing to supporting and caring for ageing parents-such that our collective footsteps have formed grooves of beliefs and meanings around contemporary Singapore as a 'pro-family' society…Yes, family ties and familial relationships are important to people. But listen closely to the rhythm of actual family lives, and things do not sit comfortably. Living in a place that calls itself 'pro-family' does not seem to mean that families have a great life. The actual doing of family in Singapore today is not easy, smooth, consistently fulfilling or joyful. 'Pro-family' is genius story-making, casting the state as protector of that which people value. But scratch the surface, and the valorisation of family-the relentless claim that this is what the Singapore state believes in and is committed to-begins to peel. Given how daily lives are described by people occupying the interior of families, we must confront the fact that this story obscures the full range of people's lives and the social conditions they are actually embedded in. If family life is so uneasy, is it reasonable to claim this to be a pro-family place?”

4. “Economy-getting the most optimal outcome with the fewest inputs—is a high priority. They looked for services that are "bang for the buck" and discussed how they try to figure out if certain services are "worth it" or "not worth it" ("it" being money). That this money is felt deeply-its spending treated with some heaviness-is especially clear when some wondered about their "returns on investment". Parents feel, intensely, the expense of raising children.They are conscious of needing to spend and yet not overspending-because there are other children in the household or because they need to save money for longer-term needs. Consequently, they try their best, essentially, to reduce "waste".”

5. “How do you solve a problem like a child who prefers play over work? This is an absurd question. Children of course prefer play over homework. Why is such a child a problem?”

6. “For example, for full-day childcare (7am to 7pm), PCF Sparkletots, one of the five current anchor operators, charges fees capped at S$680 per month for Singapore citizens. In contrast, Eton House, a private preschool, charges S$2,834 for nursery and kindergarten (8.30am to 3pm). On a per hour basis, that is nearly eight times more expensive…Preschool is not just a place for care-different preschools may lead to different 'results'. Inequality-the existence of uneven prices, quality and outcomes-is not an abstract idea but a concrete experience. The pressure to keep up, to not fall behind—i.e., to be kiasu—thus begins to be felt here.”

7. “The year a child turns 6, parents receive a letter from the Ministry of Education. The Compulsory Education Act requires parents to enrol their children in primary school the year they turn 7. Children are placed into a queue, with their turn for picking a (specific) school coming in 'phases. Phase 1 is for children with siblings already enrolled in the school. Phase 2A is for children whose parent or sibling is an alumnus of the school, or whose parent is a member of the School Advisory or Management Committee or a staff member of the school. Phase 2B is for children whose parent has been a volunteer at the school, or who is endorsed by a church or clan association connected to the school, or who is an active community leader. Phases 2C and 2C Supplementary are for children yet to have secured a place after the first phases. At each phase, if registrants outnumber vacancies, priority is given to Singapore citizens over Permanent Residents, and also first to those who reside within 1 kilometre, then 2 kilometres, of the school. A parent can apply to any school in Singapore, so all schools across the island are open to all children…One of the perverse outcomes of these primary school hierarchies is a degree of class segregation that parents are sensitive about; in explaining to me why they want to enrol their kids in good, or at least 'decent, schools, parents tell me that "who you mix with" matters. Precisely because it falls on parents to ensure that their children are in good environments, even trying to get kids into the 'normal' schools requires strategic parental action. Collective practices have thus evolved in response to these rules and procedures for allocating primary schools. In the national competition that occurs around 'top' schools, moving up in the queue (the 'phases') is one way of improving the chances of success. Some parents buy homes with the intention of being within 1 or 2 kilometres of their preferred school; others move house—in some cases renting in neighbourhoods they cannot afford to buy in—to qualify for higher priority. Some sign up, when their children are 5 or 6 years old, to serve as 'parent volunteers (PV)' in the schools they hope their children can enrol in, or join alumni or clan associations where these grant advantage; others serve as 'grassroots leaders’…. There are obvious class inequalities embedded in these acts.
Several 'good' schools are in neighbourhoods where housing is especially expensive and kept elevated precisely because of those schools and the policies that reward proximity to them. In high-demand schools, parent volunteers are so plentiful that schools are selective in the 'skillsets' that parents can offer; people in professional jobs are typically advantaged. To 'clock PV hours', moreover, requires time-either of parents who have jobs where they have control and flexibility, or of mothers in households where they can afford to be full-time caregivers.”

8. “The more things are done this way, the more it has to continue to be this way.“

9. “The phrase 'social engineering has gone out of fashion, but these metaphors remind us that these are efforts at bending society, polity and economy into certain shapes. And just as there are limits to how much land can be gardened and how much air can be cooled, there are limits to how much states can bend people to their will. I do not mean that people refuse to be ruled or openly defy rule-that has thus far not happened in Singapore. I mean that the endeavour of social engineering is bound to contain contradictions and tensions, and that the weight of these fall somewhere, on someone 'Pro-family. The obsession with defining and policing boundaries of 'family' —who it is made up of, who plays what role, who is responsible for whom-is not matched by attention to and appreciation for how people experience being givers and receivers of care throughout their lives, how people vary in aspirations and desires when it comes to relationships and what people need—structurally and culturally—to pursue their wide-ranging aspirations in life. You can hear the creaking of branches and leaves trying to grow beyond the cage. That is the metaphorical sound of people bearing 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; everyone can have upward mobility if they work hard but some talents will be rewarded more richly than others; children's mental health matters but falling behind will harm as much as pushing them to do homework will; there are many pathways to success in life but some will lead to securitv and others will not; boys and girls can study, men and women should work, men and women can have the same dreams until they cannot; care is so priceless that no one wants to pay for it.”

10. “I see that the contrast to unease is not just ease, it is also agency. When we act in ways that are in line with what we think is right or good-that is, when we exercise some semblance of moral or ethical agency—we feel comfortable with ourselves and our choices. But when we act not because we think something is right but because we feel there is no other way, then the 'choice' sits uneasily.”

[jw]

The starting point for Unease is the gap between the official narrative that Singapore is a "pro-family" society and the reality that "the actual doing of family in Singapore today is not easy, smooth, consistently fulfilling or joyful". Parenthood is stressful in Singapore, "a constant rush from one task to another…parents feel unable to do well both at work and at home - there is a perpetual sense of being on alert and slightly off-kilter. The unease is triggered not just by the demands of here and now, but also by anxieties about the future. They worry about money and security, for themselves, their children, their aging parents." In Unease, Teo You Yenn unpacks the factors and forces that shape family life in Singapore, in ways that run counter to the official narrative and espoused values.

A huge source of stress for parents in Singapore is education and much of Unease circles around education. In most countries, the early years of a child's life are perhaps the most demanding and stressful as the child depends entirely on their parent - for food, for toileting, for entertainment and comfort. Going to school eases some of these demands. Yet, in Singapore, new demands around the child's education and school performance arise, demands that are often borne by mothers and, unlike caregiving, cannot be delegated to grandparents, domestic helpers or other caregivers. This is one level of unease - that constant tension and stress of ensuring one's kids are able to stay ahead, or at least keep up. Then there is the sense of vague discomfort and wondering - does parenting have to be this hard, such a chore, so exhausting?

It is not uncommon to hear criticisms of kiasu parents in Singapore, that they are the source of stress in the Singapore education system. No matter what reforms the Ministry of Education has rolled out - creating more pathways for students to grow and progress, blunting streaming, etc - competitive parents undermine these efforts by trying to secure new advantages under a revamped system. But Teo reminds us not to focus only on micro dynamics and factors, such as the mindsets and behaviours of individuals, but to also look at the meso layer of institutions and their practices, the macro layer of policies, regulations and laws, and global forces at play. By engaging at these different levels, we can "overcome our tendencies to see individual lives as driven purely by 'personal' acts and idiosyncratic choices….[while] people have agency and make choices…these are never in a social vacuum - the options people have are shaped by numerous social, economic, political forces beyond a given person."

Teo points out that "the demands and logics of the education system generate needs and tensions [that] intensify care labour and parental obligations", with the PSLE being seen as the start of a narrowing vertical funnel that has an outsize impact on a child's subsequent pathway in life. She argues school choice becomes a high stakes, high investment process for parents, given that that parents are the ones who can and must choose among all possible schools (vs being assigned, say, to the closest school) and given the significant differences between schools in terms of academic outcomes and the consequential nature of these outcome. Parental behaviour is influenced by "the structural-cultural forms disproportionately shaped by how the state organises education and its rewards." Parents in Singapore feel compelled to engage in kiasu behaviour because they see what is at stake in an unequal society. Fall off the mainstream path and your child will struggle to earn a decent living; "the parent in Singapore today has been steered, over the years and through multiple structural and cultural forces, into two options: be (some version of) kiasu or be a neglectful, irresponsible parent".

And while "schools replace parents' care labour in some ways and for some hours of the day, they also generate tasks and responsibilities for parents, compelling them - women especially - to rethink and reorganise their paid work."

I don't know how Teo's critique of the Singapore system, with the education system being a large part of it, will be received. But I think the stories Teo shares from her interviews with parents, the sentiments they expressed, will not be unfamiliar to readers who are parents. I was acutely conscious, reading this book after the children had gone to bed, that I had spent the evening - during the June holidays! - making sure that they were on track with their Student Learning Space submissions, reading their eZhishi assignments, doing their Chinese worksheets for enrichment class and what have you. And I had a newly acquired assessment book - recommended by the school teacher to help my son lock down the MCQ section of the exams - sitting on the table. Because I am a good parent who is an active participant in the school-parent partnership (who dutifully checks Parents Gateway, SLS and Class Dojo).

Teo asks the question, does parenting have to be this way in Singapore? Does it have to be so tiring, so uneasy? Can we not change the script? Yet, part of me wonders why it should be surprising that parenting in Singapore be viewed through the lens of sacrifice, constant struggle and effort. After all, our very national narrative is based on the notion of constant, relentless effort to remain exceptional (or perish).

Teo argues that there are bigger issues at stake here that require us to address this unease head on. She points out that "three sets of values matter to Singaporeans - meritocracy and mobility, familial connections, inclusive community. Our way of doing work and family contradicts the things we care about - we want people to be able to fulfil their dreams and potentials, but our systems orient towards constricted pathways; we value family ties, but the hectic and tense realities inside familial lives make living lovingly together difficult; we would like to be an inclusive society, but hierarchy and competition make clear to us that belonging is heavily conditional on credentials, employment and money". Teo warns that we risk developing these characteristics instead:
- "independence without ethical agency" when we focus on taking care of our own family's problems and our children's needs, but fail to intentionally consider why we do what we do;
- "conformism without solidarity" when we act uniformly, obeying rules and following procedures well but without a sense of mutual obligation to others in society, which is a "politics of thin solidarity and limited imagination"; and
- "valorisation of success without deep respect for human worth" where we look at particular, individualised and narrowly defined success and not broader notions of human worth.

I preferred Teo's earlier book, This is What Inequality Looks Like. It was eye-opening and thought provoking, and I learned to see differently with each chapter that examined a different aspect of the low-income experience - their every day life in rental flats, how they juggle work and family commitments, parenting, etc. Unease moves at a different pace and along a different path; it circles the topic of parenthood, and in particular how mothers modify their approach to work and life and "fold down" once their children enter school, examining it from different angles, through the micro, meso and macro layers. It's still an excellent read, just quite different in style from TIWILL. 4 stars overall.

[Sarah]

DNF • Page 40

Repetitive • Meandering • Underdeveloped

Highlights ✨️

The writing feels repetitive without developing the central argument

The book keeps circling the same point repeatedly

Ideas take too long to progress beyond their introduction

The opening feels unnecessarily drawn out and slow

Arguments lack enough depth to sustain interest throughout

The writing struggles to maintain momentum between different ideas

By page forty, the book still feels stuck

[Sean]

Felt like the claims made were not backed up by the interviews cited - beyond capturing the symptom, which is an amorphous sense of anxiety or “unease” (granted Teo uses this term well to describe precisely the disjunct between the state’s pro-family rhetoric and pervasive parental anxieties), I’m not sure that the diagnosis is on the mark. Then again, perhaps that’s the nature of the societal ailment we now face - complex, hard to nail down, even harder to solve.

[Alan Tao]

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.

[Niki Wang]

Unease is better than This Is What Inequality Looks Like, but I still have the same problem with Teo You Yenn's work: too much structure, not enough agency.

I actually agree with much of her description of Singapore family life: educational competition, tuition, two working parents, fear of falling behind. But the real intellectual meat only started around page 165 of a 200-page book, when she finally connects educational inequality, qualifications and income. If credentials have major economic consequences, then the tuition arms race isn't simply irrational kiasu behaviour. There are real stakes.

Perhaps I react differently to this book because my own life is a counterexample I would have liked Teo to explore.

My parents were poorly educated, didn't speak English, never earned much, and became even poorer after their divorce. Yet as a child I passed the Maths and general ability components of the GEP selection test and missed English by one mark. I remain bitter about that one mark because I know a different educational environment might have changed my trajectory.

At the same time, I grew up alongside children whose starting points were completely different. One classmate had two lawyers as parents, grew up speaking English and was groomed from childhood to become a doctor. We were supposedly competing in the same meritocratic system, but we clearly weren't starting from the same place.

And yet structure didn't determine everything. I eventually became highly educated myself. But I also looked at the standard Singapore pathway—career, mortgage, children, enrichment, tuition, constant competition—and decided I didn't want to reproduce it. One reason I chose not to have children was that I didn't believe I could reach the level of financial security from which I would personally be comfortable raising them.

That's why I kept wanting Teo to interview the people who opt out.

Where are the parents who refuse tuition despite everyone else doing it? Where are those who genuinely don't care whether their child gets AL1 or AL5? Where are people who looked at the entire mainstream family package and simply said, “No thanks”?

Ironically, these people might strengthen Teo's argument. If you reject the mainstream pathway and still feel its pressure, then the structure is more powerful than simply showing that people participating in it feel stressed.

Structure shapes the menu. Agency determines what you order—including deciding not to eat there.

And sociology misses something important if it interviews only the people sitting at the table.

3 stars. I agreed with more of this book than I expected, but I wanted much more explanation, more counterexamples, and far fewer pages of description.

[Jee Koh]

Beneath the gleaming facade of Singapore lies a palpable angst among its people. Through the perceptive analysis of interviews with 92 Singaporeans of different ethnicities, classes, educational levels, occupations, genders, and marital statuses, Singaporean sociologist TEO You Yenn puts her finger on the sore spot in her new book Unease: Life in Singapore Families. Cannily she locates this gnawing sense of unease in the gap between national aspirations and familial realities. Singapore claims to be pro-family, and yet family life is hectic, anxious, and burdensome.

What follows is a fine-grained examination of societal structure (institutions, policies, etc.) and culture (norms, values, habits, etc.), the former creating the latter, the latter reinforcing the former, including a chapter devoted to gender and another to class. The book would be of interest only to scholars and Singaporeans if it does not also have penetrating things to say about inequality. The problem of inequality is not just the problem of uplifting the disadvantaged, Teo argues; it is a problem afflicting the whole of society.

Inequality changes our values, the way we view ourselves and others. First, it promotes independence without ethical agency. Neoliberal capitalism teaches individual survival by any means, discouraging us from ethical reflection. Second, inequality inculcates conformity without solidarity. We learn to play by the rules in order to survive, but we abandon others in similar straits. Third, inequality valorizes success without deep respect for human worth. Success is defined in terms of status and wealth, undermining the intrinsic value of a human being. The greater the inequality in our societies, the more virulent are these harmful values.

Here, the sociologist almost steps into the role of a moralist, but Teo is ready with her defense. As a critical sociologist, she works by the shorthand—describe, explain, activate—the last very close to advocacy. In her new book, she is wise enough not to prescribe any specific policy or program; instead, she leaves her reader to think more deeply about ethical agency, solidarity, and respect for human worth.

[Celeste]

The way I highlighted the entire book!! Impossible to even leave a few excerpts here.

Run, don't walk, for the 3rd book written by the GOAT Teo Yeo Yenn who shows us the importance of sociology — not as a psuedoscience — but one that frames the individual in a larger societal context and shows the constraints of choices of parenthood in Singapore. She highlights the uncanniness of government advertisements in Singapore showing a happy, smiling family; contrasted against an abysmally low birth rate and the experience of parents across all socio-economic spectrums exhibiting unease. She talks about the tuition industry occupying the heartland malls and how parents are accused of being "kiasu" when they have been set up in a system that perpetuates those anxieties. More importantly, she points out the contradiction of a government whose narrative of providing much for the people, yet telling them not to expect much from the government and pushing things to the narrative of individual responsibility.

My friend May observed in business school the cultural difference amongst the Southeast Asians: the Indonesians looked after each other and shared their notes; the Singaporeans generally minded their own business and forged their own school experience by themselves. What if her anecdote (which I agree with) could be explained as part of the broader norms embedded in Singapore society, the constant competition, ranking and hierarchy?

Now if I can get my hands on a similar book but for Swiss society...

[Trang Ngo]

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.

[Rong Hui]

"What is a good society, and how will we get there? These are genuine questions only if they are everybody's right and duty to ask and answer."

Definitely a more challenging read than TIWILL (at times it felt like a Sociology textbook / literature review), but a rewarding one. Instead of being prescriptive with approaches to policy that can foster greater inclusivity, TYY instead leaves us with questions to ponder (What is a good society? What values should we value?), which then shape the principles that underpin the lens we adopt when evaluating our education and political system. I appreciated the balance she struck between her drive to give voice to women / lower-income families as a sociologist, and the privilege she recognised she had as an academic.

While the book partly appeals to the public to be more inclusive towards others who do not conform to more conventional paths in SG, it is recognised that a large part of this change has to come from the system itself. Part of me does wonder if this book is enough to emphasise and push for this need for change, or if the struggles raised in the book will get swept under the rug as SG continues doing well on the surface. The growing online discourse on this book can only be the first step — we can only hope that it sends a signal that people do resonate with the narratives shared in her interviews, or at least, are interested in understanding or partaking in these conversations.

[Jonathan Lee]

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

[Kaamela Barvin]

Finally finished reading this after attending a panel and listening to a podcast with the writer, You Yenn on them. I personally really appreciate her as a researcher and how thoughtfully she approaches her work. The book didn't surprise me and I don't think it intends to! (if you're Singaporean). It mainly, through anecdotes, demonstrates the impact of the education system on family life. It convincingly shows that asking parents to 'shift their mindset' or 'be less kiasu' is ridiculous (frankly gaslighting) because while the internal parts of the education system have been rearranged, the larger framework of sorting at a young age, hierarchy, elitism remains.

I think what's also commendable is her efforts to show that the impact of the education system is cross cutting - negatively impacting families across the socio-economic spectrum. To different degrees but cross cutting nonetheless. This is then a good rallying call. All of us should expect better and demand for better. It's not a problem of a 'poor minority'. There's power in that and frankly refreshing. It's calling attention to the structures and not letting people simply cast pity or boohoo statements while trudging along.

[Jerine Tan]

Reading Unease by Teo You Yenn definitely left me feeling uneasy. Though relatively short, it is remarkably impactful and I found myself taking frequent pauses just to sit with and process all that was written.

The book hits home on multiple levels. Having grown up within the local education system, reading this brought back vivid memories of navigating those pressures firsthand. Reading it now as an adult, however, offers a sobering perspective on what our parents' generation likely endured to steer us through. Years later, it is striking to note that despite how much the mechanics have changed, the fundamental pressures within the system still persist. Looking at friends, colleagues, and family members today, that parental anxiety has only multiplied, fueled by social media and an intense expectation of hyper-involvement.

The research is sharp and incisive, even anticipating typical Singaporean reactions and unpacking the mindset behind them. It offers immense food for thought on how we navigate daily familial life and societal expectations in Singapore. Highly recommended, particularly for anyone contemplating parenthood.

[Kelvin Lau]

Author critically points out the state of tension that people living in Singapore experiences constantly, which she labels it as "unease". As a Singaporean who has lived his entire life here, reading this book draws out resonance and realisation which we do not typically reflect on. In particular, the apparent contradiction between the state's espoused state family first/friendly policies and the lack of individual agency experienced on the ground; ingrained mindset to conform to a state directed path yet a lack of solidarity in the society; the paternalistic and sometimes intrusive approach taken by the government in certain social policies yet the lack of interventionism in providing necessary safety nets and min basic income. All these policies result in this state of tension, or unease as the author points out, that needs active thinking and fresh ground up ideas to untangle this knot. A component of the unease comes from the lack of self agency, or "no choice", which we cannot allow to deepen over time in our much valorised and highly regarded by others society.

[Aquila M]

Unease by sociologist Teo You Yenn shines a spotlight on the apparent gap between the ideal narrative of a "pro-family" Singapore and the lived reality of parents who often feel stressed, exhausted, and anxious.

The author draws from interviews with 92 parents across different backgrounds, arguing that "kiasu" (fear of losing out) parenting is not merely a cultural trait but a response to structural conditions, such as the education system and social inequality. The book examines how these pressures affect family life and calls for a broader conversation about what a good society should look like.

While parts of the book feel scattered and a tad too academic for layman readers, the author’s attempt to examine the lives of typical Singaporean families through a sociological lens nonetheless provides fresh and valuable perspectives on what a more equal, inclusive, and open-minded society can look like. Most saliently, this requires a shift away from the narrow, individualistic definitions of success, which I find particularly compelling.

My rating: 4/5

[Sarah]

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)