MAY 5 2000

Want more babies? Get Tarzan to help at home <>

The answer to falling birthrates may be to get husbands more actively involved in household responsibilities

TARZAN and Jane, a Singaporean couple, marry in their mid-20s.

They spend a bomb on their wedding and their flat. Then they build a career, and splash their savings on a part-time master's degree.

By the time they decide to have children, they are in their 30s. They do their sums, considering the cost of Jane giving up her job. In the end, being practical Singaporeans, they decide it is not quite worth their while to have babies.

This snapshot of how a modern Singaporean couple work out their dilemma on starting a family came from reader Sandy Low, who said in an e-mail: "Responsibilities come with being a parent... Give parents monetary incentives to help them discharge their responsibilities. No money, no babies!"

She was one of the roughly 300 people who responded to a series of Straits Times articles on the falling birthrate last week.

A committee of top civil servants is looking at ways to improve the birth figures.

The message from couples: More government and workplace support is needed to help them balance family life and career.

Some requests, no doubt, will raise the ire of taxpayers, especially those without children: Give a baby bonus of $5,000, or $10,000 or even $20,000 for every third child born; free medical treatment for children up to the age of 16, or 18, or 21; cars without COEs for families with young children.

While some demands are outrageous, the principle that families need financial support from the state to care for children should offend no one.

Indeed, Nobel prize-winning economist Gery Becker, in his book, A Treatise On The Family, argues that parents' decisions to have children are akin to an investment decision, and can be analysed economically.

He postulates that fertility is linked to real interest rates. His argument, illustrated with forbidding-looking equations, is complex. As far as I can make out, it goes something like this:

High interest rates give high returns on investment. Parents view children as an investment. So when expected returns are high, they are more likely to have additional children.

As it is, working mothers in Singapore get a subsidy to pay for childcare. They also get two months' paid maternity leave and can claim tax relief for the maid levy.

But money should not be the only solution. Broader socio-cultural factors -- what Chief Statistician Paul Cheung calls "lifestyle choice" factors -- may be even more important.

A look at the experiences of other countries suggests that mothers have more children not when they have more money, but when they are able to balance family and career, and when their men lend them support. Take Japan and Italy, with a fertility rate of 1.4 births per woman and 1.2 respectively. Singapore's birth rate was 1.5 last year. A population needs a birth rate of 2.1 babies to replace itself.

In Italy and Japan, where traditional gender expectations remain strong, some researchers say women want no or few babies because they are expected to, both, work and take charge of the household, with little support from the husband.

In Japan, media articles pinpoint the country's corporate culture of "work before family" as a main reason for falling birth rates. One researcher, deputy director of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research Makoto Ato, has said: "The declining birthrate has resulted largely because society has long demanded that women solve various problems on their own."

In Singapore, a survey last year showed that working mothers still bear most of the responsibility of caring for children and running the household.

Sociologist Stella Quah, who did the survey, pointed this out as a potential stress factor in future for the otherwise-healthy Singapore family.

I am not aware of any study which looks at birthrates in Singapore in relation to participation from husbands in household responsibilities. But a fair number of the 300 readers cited this as a factor in their decisions to stop at zero, one or two.

A look at Sweden is instructive.

It bucked the trend of falling birthrates, with a birthrate that went up -- from 1.61 in 1983, to 2.13 in the early 1990s, at a time when the average birth rate in Europe was about 1.4.

The reason: Sweden's generous family-support policies, typical of the Scandinavian countries.

In Sweden, parents can take up to 12 months' leave, on 80-per-cent salary, when a baby is born. This benefit can be used by either or both parent so long as the total number of days of leave taken does not exceed the 360-day limit.

In addition, another three months' leave with an allowance of about $11 per day can be taken. Either parent can also get up to 120 days' leave at 80-per-cent income to care for their sick children.

Advertising and information campaigns run by the state encourage fathers to make use of the year's parental leave.

To be sure, the Swedish system, funded by tax rates of between 30 and 50 per cent, is under strain. Family benefits were among the welfare benefits cut in recent years as the economy slowed.

As a result, the birthrate has dropped in the late 1990s, to 1.8 in 1998 -- still higher than the rate of 1.2 in Italy and Spain, where, according to a newspaper report, working mothers "can expect little help from their husbands or the state." Singapore need not follow to the letter Sweden's generous -- some say overly-generous -- family-support policies. But it can learn from the principles behind those measures, which can be summed up as: