At 16, my dream of the future certainly included my loved ones and beautiful children. The perfect two, a boy and a girl, just like the “Stop at two” posters. Ironically, at 21, I started having second thought about getting married. So here I am, trying to figure out why young people (like me) these days are reluctant to have children. Is it simply a financial problem?

As the economy of Singapore continue to grow and bloom, her birth rate fell and dropped last year to 1.26 babies per woman of childbearing age. Certainly, there are other areas of concern that keep Singaporean away from parenting. It is not uncommon to hear people sputtered in exasperation,” How do you expect me to have children when I’m a child myself?” Thus, I would like to propose a research project that looks into this issue, targeting at the students at NUS.

Instead of relying only on the common assumption that materialistic goals are the only evils in stopping the birth of babies, an attitudinal survey would be needed to answer the research question, “What is keeping young Singaporean from parenting?” Thus, the survey results would enable us to come up with feasible solutions to curb the problem.

Finally, we could address the problem by coming up with an appropriate model of rewards that would encourage young Singapore couples to pass on the Singaporean genes. The method of presentations would be to compare the parenthood packages offered by developed nations to increase birth rate. The two models that I would like to compare are the Singapore’s newly revised Marriage and Parenthood Schemes to Norway’s welfare model. I found Norway’s success story in keeping a healthy birthrate interesting and applicable to Singapore.

In conclusion, the issue of the proposed project is delayed parenthood in Singapore and the objective of the study is to determine the causes which might induce the students at NUS to having the intention of delayed parenthood. Hence, the report would cover a proposed solution model to solving the Singapore’s problem.