Why You Won't Win Singapore's Parenting Race | Prof. Teo You Yenn

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]One of the ironic things I think about uh our our situation >> um so when when people talk about stereotypes of like tiger moms or um kasu parents >> part of that stereotype indicates that people every that everybody wants their kids to be the top >> I that's not what I found you know that in fact most people want their kids not to fall below average.

[00:00:28]>> Yeah.

[00:00:29]>> Yeah. If you think about that, this is not um in some ways it's it's not it's it's like we don't think highly enough of our in some ways it's very ironic.

[00:00:41]It's like it's it feels like it's putting too much pressure and yet >> it also feels like a we're not aspiring high enough for our children, >> you know. So it's this kind of paradoxical situation where where we don't seem to collectively >> we don't seem to have enough uh belief in what our young people uh have the capacity to do.

[00:01:05]>> And I think it goes back again to if there are too many high stakes kind of gates.

[00:01:12]>> Yeah.

[00:01:13]>> And and the game is oriented towards that crossing that next gate, right? and and as I described in the book, there's a kind of a narrowing funnel going up, right?

[00:01:23]>> Uh then I think it's very hard for us to focus on or it's very hard for us to give space to young people to develop a lot of things >> in a lot of different ways, >> right? Because if you develop if you do a lot of different things, you have many different hobbies, probably you're not going to be good at all of them, of course. Yeah. But there are still probably from that you can certainly figure out who you are as a person, >> right? what value you can be to society and then how to think about you know both >> uh where you want to pursue more specialized talents as well as where uh you know you are weaker and you you want to do more of right that that children and young people will have more space to figure out themselves and and and to to develop their talents that way >> and I think from that you would actually probably see a lot more kind of flowering of different types of talent.

[00:02:24]Yeah. If there were more >> time and space >> to to sort of haphazardly >> figure stuff out.

[00:02:32]>> Figure stuff out. Yeah. Time very importantly. And now even if somebody doesn't then find out that they're a very talented athlete or artist or whatever, they will still have developed into a more complete person with a broader set of capacities for living in the world.

[00:02:52]>> Yeah.

[00:02:52]>> Right. They will still have developed a greater sense of like, oh, this is what it's like to be doing work in this area or pursuing things in the arts. Yeah.

[00:03:04]this is what it's like to live as a person doing this other kind of profession or um you know I I I tried this thing and this allows me to see or this allows me to have had certain friends in certain areas that otherwise I wouldn't have had >> um I don't think that that's a wasted you know I think we we think too much of like >> if it doesn't lead to an outcome >> that I can see and predict then it's not worth it, right?

[00:03:37]>> And I think that that's a kind of >> um that's a kind of uh uh how should I say um it's it's a pity, you know, that that we think that we often, you know, uh sort of >> um approach things that way where where we think if there's no immediate returns like then I'm not going to do it, >> then I won't do it. Yeah.

[00:04:03]>> Yeah. But you like 65% of Singaporeans asked for this. I mean this that's why you see people say after last year's elections.

[00:04:13]>> How do you square that with with what Yeah. I mean the elections were a very big thing in the last 5 years as well, right? That where people almost quite empathetically said that hey this way of life that we have in Singapore is something that I can live with. How does that square for you in in based on what your research says? Um I think that um political life and how people think about uh themselves as political actors, you cannot fully capture probably only in elections, right? And elections are >> important and they signal important things, right? But they cannot capture necessarily all the information about how people experience life including how people experience themselves as political actors.

[00:05:02]Um I think um when I think about where I ended this book with and again I hope people will get to the end of this book right the end of this book is where I try to think more broadly about what kind of shared culture we have and including what kind of shared political culture we have >> and it may surprise readers to think that I think of my work as >> that that way that at that the end of the book is in some ways talking about a political culture Because I'm not talking about sort of politics capital P, right? I'm not just talking about electoral politics. I'm not just talking about who is or isn't in power or how power is distributed, but I'm talking about how people think about how they relate to society >> and how people imagine the role of the state.

[00:05:55]>> Yeah. And how people imagine the connection between the public and the private.

[00:06:01]>> Mhm. Yeah. And here is where I think um a lot of what seems to be very private acts have very public consequences.

[00:06:13]>> Yeah. That when we live our lives in these very individualistic ways by which I mean we feel like we have to come up with all our solutions ourselves or we are in competition with others. I think we neglect to see how we for example have collective action problems. Yeah.

[00:06:31]That if we act together, we we can create different alternatives, right? Uh and we fail to develop in some ways the habits that are necessary >> for a more um vibrant and solidarityfilled kind of uh relationship with other members of our society.

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[00:07:26]Thank you so much.