Unease: Life in Singapore Families
Teo You Yenn
Ethos Books: 2026
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On the surface, Singapore gleams. It’s wealthy, orderly, safe. The trains (generally) run on time, the amenities are plentiful, and the tiny city-state punches above its weight in international rankings to do with governance and education. Singapore is regularly brought up by policy wonks and politicians around the world—and across the political spectrum—as a model to learn from. The government enthusiastically proclaims itself to be “pro-family”, gearing policies towards supporting (heterosexual) Singaporeans with getting married and having children. What’s not to like?

Everything sounds great on paper. Yet, through years of research and lengthy interviews with close to a hundred parents, sociologist Teo You Yenn uncovers a different reality: “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.” There is, she observes, a “sense of unease” that sits in the hearts of families in Singapore, regardless of their socioeconomic background.

Teo’s previous book, This Is What Inequality Looks Like—an ethnographic study of low-income households in Singapore—became a national bestseller when it hit the shelves in 2018. It pushed Singaporeans to look beyond rhetoric about “uplifting the poor” and instead consider inequality as a nationwide condition from which none of us can be extricated. With Unease: Life in Singapore Families, Teo directs attention to quotidian family life and once again prompts Singaporeans to reflect on the nature of the water we swim in.

Setting out to understand how parents navigate the much coveted but often elusive work–life balance, Teo finds that it isn’t basic childcare that occupies the most real estate in parents’ minds—it’s education. “Education systems or policies are rarely considered, by scholars or policymakers, as a source of work-life conflict; yet, my research shows that education has become a big component of ‘care labour’,” she writes. “Contemporary demands on parenting go well beyond baths and burps and fevers and sleeplessness, to supervision and nagging and strategising and conflicts of an entirely different, arguably more stress-inducing, level.”

Everyone in Singapore knows of the “kiasu parent”. Translated from Hokkien, to be ‘kiasu’ means to be afraid to lose, or lose out. The kiasu parent is obsessed with ensuring their kid keeps up with, if not outstrips, the rest of their cohort. The kiasu parent studies school rankings as if they contain the meaning of life and plots to get their offspring into the best option. The kiasu parent harasses teachers for progress reports and even demands extra homework. The kiasu parent, keeping tabs on what other (kiasu) parents are doing, signs their sprog up for extra tuition in all subjects… and also for piano, swimming, and ballet.

This archetype of the kiasu parent is often the butt of jokes—a beast to be reckoned with, but one we roll our eyes at. Government officials evoke their spectre when speaking of the need for a “mindset shift”, implying that the problems of a pressure-cooker education system stem from individual attitudes. Things would surely change if only all these parents could just stop being so kiasu.

Teo has no interest in lecturing parents. She’s much more invested in the structures within which Singaporean parents operate. Kiasu parents do not simply emerge, fully-formed, from Singapore’s diminishing rainforests; if they’re terrified of losing out, something must be making them feel like competitors in the first place. And individual parents have neither the clout nor capacity to shape the arena and dictate the rules. That can only come from something bigger and more powerful: government policies, institutional processes and procedures, social conditions that everyone has to respond or adapt to.

Education is a high-stakes game in Singapore. Although there have been shifts, over the years, away from a hyper-focus on academic results, the practices of scoring and sorting are still prevalent. Exam results still determine one’s ability to enter certain schools, access particular opportunities, or obtain qualifications from tertiary institutions—all of which can have a material impact down the line. Where you went to university—or if you even went at all—affects your employment, your salary scale, your social status. And the route to university requires the successful navigation of A-Level exams in junior college, O-Level exams in secondary school, the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE)… all the way back to learning to read and write in preschool, even before compulsory education kicks in.

“No one owes you a living.” Teo hears this repeatedly during her interviews. It’s a deeply internalised mantra: Singaporeans are expected to be “self-reliant” and families are the “first line of support” if needs arise. Teo’s interviewees know that “everything they need, for themselves and their families, must come from income they and/or their spouses can generate”, even as they observe that the future might become “more difficult, more expensive, more competitive”. When we recognise this anxiety as the context that informs people’s behaviour, we realise parents aren’t pushing their children to study hard and ace exams out of vanity or pride—they put immense amounts of effort and resources into their children’s education because there are real, long-term costs to falling short or falling behind.

These responses to social and political conditions generate their own momentum: the more parents hover over and invest in their children’s education outside of the mainstream school system, the more they have to continue doing it, whether they like it or not. This pressure contributes to the unease: in their conversations with Teo, parents express discomfort, even guilt, over the demands and expectations piled on young shoulders. They pity their children for not having time to play and just be kids. Yet they can’t stop creating study schedules, hiring tutors, or lining up ‘enrichment’ classes—because depriving their children of things that could give them a leg up in life feels like failure, too.

This is a game in which every parent is required to compete, but not everyone plays the same way. Teo devotes chapters in Unease to how parenting is navigated differently based on gender and class. Women “fold down” their selves, minimising their own needs to make space for priorities around their children; men, meanwhile, conceive of their roles as providers who might sometimes “support” their wives with tasks and responsibilities at home. Working-class parents pay close attention to their children’s studies but are acutely aware of their financial limitations and moderate their expectations accordingly; on the other end of the spectrum, wealthy parents bring the full weight of their formidable resources to bear so the little ones have everything they need to thrive. Between these two groups, middle-class parents budget and calculate and compare, determined to get the most value out of what they can afford for their kids.

Notably, no one—no matter how poor or how rich—seems to be at ease. A society organised around competition, hierarchy, and judgments that value people differently based on their qualifications, occupations, or income leaves its mark on everyone.

Unease focuses on Singaporean parents but it is, as Teo says, “not just a book about parents and parenting”. I don’t have to be a Singaporean parent to relate to what she describes because I was once a Singaporean child. I remember what school was like: being sorted into classes based on exam results, squirming as a teacher returned test papers in front of the whole class in order of lowest to highest scorer, so we’d all know exactly where we stood in relation to our peers. Watching the adults favour the ‘top’ classes and students, and extrapolating that into a belief that love and one’s value as a person are conditional upon meeting or exceeding other people’s expectations. These are the experiences and beliefs we carry not only into parenting, but every other facet of our lives. Every Singaporean, parent or not, has been told that no one owes us a living, and we live accordingly—always braced for uncertain futures, always worried the bottom could fall out any time, always anxious about being the one who can’t keep up and gets left behind.

On the surface, Singapore gleams. On paper, we should all be happy and secure, basking in our perfect, “pro-family” city. But there’s a gap between what’s on paper and reality, and that’s where the unease Teo identifies resides. It is “a subtle discomfort, not a full-blown crisis; a niggling feeling, just under the surface of placid waters and therefore hard to detect”. Singaporeans seem to have it really good, but something is just “not quite right”.

For Singaporeans, Unease is a clarion call to recognise the cost of living this way and to imagine better alternatives. For non-Singaporeans, the book is a reminder that, whenever Singapore is held up as a role model, one needs to pay attention to what’s really happening beneath the dazzling surface.

• Tags: Issue 44, Kirsten Han, Singapore, Teo You Yenn