Year: 2013

by Callan Tham

Following AWARE’s article with three fathers who shared their views on paternity leave in Singapore – “What fathers say on Father’s Day”, published in The Online Citizen on 16 June 2013 – Callan Tham, another father, wrote to AWARE to add his opinion about the current paternity leave policy. He looks forward to a policy change that would support shared parenting between fathers and mothers.

Nothing really prepares one for parenthood. It is one of those contradictions in life – something that is not completely what one expects it to be, and yet entirely how one expects to experience it.

When my son Ayrton was born almost 3 years ago, I was lucky enough to be working on rotational shifts. This meant I could accumulate my off-days and paid leave, and take about 6 weeks off from my job to care for both my wife and son, right after we welcomed him into the world. Every night, I fed him and changed his soiled diapers while my wife rested. I took naps in the day as my wife took care of him. He is a shared responsibility through and through. This shared parenting enabled me to bond with him. It also strengthened my bond with my wife.

Even before I stepped into fatherhood, I’ve always wondered what it would be like. I know many colleagues who become fathers and have to struggle to cope without the luxuries that many of us take for granted. We managed to hire a good domestic helper and my parents helped to look after Ayrton in the weekdays, as both Karen and I work. These are luxuries for which we are grateful, but one plays the hand one is dealt.

My experience as a father would have differed greatly, had I held a typical 9 – 5 job with limited leave flexibility. This is why the current policy situation is curiously and woefully lacking, especially in the light of our fertility rate, which resembles a chart depicting a catastrophic stock market crash.

Fathers want to be a part of their children’s life growing up, but are only given a mere fraction of paid leave to do that. While it is an improvement over zero, it is hardly enough. In its current state, it is akin to a band-aid, or a panadol tablet — a temporary measure that does nothing in the long term.

I think the Swedish model for paternity leave could be adapted for Singapore. That would require the Government to take a huge leap of faith in an act of legislative courage. I am nevertheless hopeful that I can see such an act in my lifetime. As a father, I do not want to see mothers bear the burden of childbearing and child-raising alone, while fathers are deprived of the joys of shared parenting.

by Abdul Shariff Aboo Kassim, Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, Chan Kin Kok with Vivienne Wee and Ranjana Raghunathan

To mark Father’s Day, AWARE invited three fathers to give their views of the newly introduced paternity leave and conversion of one week of maternity leave to shared parental leave. They were Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir (father of a five-year-old son and a nineteen-month-old daughter), Abdul Shariff Aboo Kassim (soon to be father of a second child) and Chan Kin Kok (father of a four-year-old daughter).

Voicing their views independently, they converged on two points. On the one hand, they welcome the new leave policies. Kamaludeen describes these as recognition of “the significant roles of fathers in the care of children.”

Abdul Shariff concurs: “When my first child was born, the lack of paternity leave meant that I had to return to work just days after my wife was discharged from the maternity ward. I welcome the legislation of paid paternity leave and hope that my daughter, due in four months’ time, will not face the same plight as her brother.” Chan notes that the six-day paternity leave will be particularly useful to those fathers with limited annual leave, who cannot carry over leave from previous years.

On the other hand, they agree that care-giving fathers need better support. Abdul Shariff considers the six days of paternity leave insufficient “for men who wish to be more involved parents. It merely provides a week’s relief to mothers of a newborn.”

Their views are congruent with AWARE’s 2011 survey of 1001 parents, which showed 91 per cent agreeing on mandatory paid paternity leave, with 80 per cent asking for more than 6 days and 44 per cent, more than 11 days. Most agreed that four weeks of the 16-week maternity leave should become parental leave, available to either spouse.

Kamaludeen notes that “fathers play a pivotal role in the development of their children beyond these months of infancy.” He hopes for paternity leave to be expanded beyond current stipulations that make such leave available only within 16 weeks after the birth of a Singapore Citizen child or flexibly within 12 months after the birth, pending mutual agreement between employer and employee. He points out that flexible paternity leave is needed should the mother fall ill, as no woman can be expected “to stay healthy 365 days a year “, regardless of whether they work or stay at home.

Although many fathers value their roles as caregivers, they are not given sufficient opportunities to develop the skills, sensibilities and habits necessary to be good caregivers. Chan identifies the problem as a work environment that stigmatises fathers who take time off to care for their children, expecting men to prioritise work over family.

Abdul Shariff observes that “caregiving is still perceived as a woman’s domain.” The perpetuation of gender stereotypes pressures many women to drop out of the workforce, sacrificing career and financial security to be the main parent responsible for the children’s well-being.

Abdul Shariff notes that support given to fathers will help mothers to stay in the workforce. He suggests that flexible work arrangements for fathers, especially during the child’s first three months, will allow working mothers to spread their 16 weeks of maternity leave over 24 months. Currently, working mothers have to take eight weeks’ leave as a block, with only the remaining eight weeks available for flexible use over 12 months.

“Such a move would relieve employers, who otherwise have to bear with their female employees’ lengthy absence. This would, in turn, encourage them to be more flexible with male employees”, he said.

This father’s suggestion echoes the call by NTUC and AWARE for flexi-work arrangements to be made available to all working parents. AWARE has always advocated shared parenting, with fathers more involved in childcare.

Abdul Shariff points out that in contemporary families, men do have to play a greater role as caregiver and women, as wage-earner: “Getting married later in life is a growing trend. It makes sense for women to strive for financial independence. The shift in mean age of having the first child means that caregiving needs are much greater now. Couples wishing to have more children cannot afford to have large age gaps between their children, in view of age-related risks. Moreover, parents’ expectations are higher as they endeavour to secure a stable future for their children amidst increasing uncertainty. These factors emphasise the growing need for shared parenting. While I am thankful that many existing policies have been enhanced, I hope they will be improved further to enable fathers to play a bigger role in caring for their children.”

Policies are genuinely pro-family only if they support fathers and mothers as both care-givers and wage-earners, able to meet family needs.

(Abdul Shariff Aboo Kassim, Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir and Chan Kin Kok are the fathers of young children. Vivienne Wee and Ranjana Raghunathan are, respectively, AWARE’s Research and Advocacy Director and Research and Advocacy Coordinator.)

The article is published on The Online Citizen, on 16 June, 2013.

When I became a mother five years ago, I experienced acutely what I had known as a sociologist — structural conditions matter.

In the first week after our baby was born, my husband and I were equally pathetic in our cluelessness; the learning curve was steep and we tried and failed together. We were on equal footing with caring for baby on most fronts.

After he went back to work and I stayed home with the baby, however, our paths on that learning curve quickly diverged. While he remained committed to playing a major role — waking up for night feeds to change the diapers before passing baby to me, and soothing the baby back to sleep afterward — I inadvertently became the more competent and more confident parent.

It is reasonable that women receive more public support when it comes to being at home with an infant; they do need the time after the birth of a child for recovery and to establish breastfeeding. However, for men to learn to be fathers in the way women have to learn to be mothers, they need comparable opportunities and support for developing competence in everyday acts of caregiving.

Anything worth doing takes practice to do well. This includes parenting. Mothers and fathers are made, not born. They are made through hands-on learning, through multiple trial and error. When we speak in glowing terms about the importance of motherhood and fatherhood, we often speak in general terms without considering the everyday caring for the young.

Particularly for the middle-class, popular culture is permeated with references to “quality time” and “involvement”, without adequate attention to the significance of everyday acts — wiping noses, sneaking vegetables into meals, nagging for the 10th time that it is time for a shower.

Paying attention to these small acts that populate a child’s day, we see that being a caregiver is not always pretty and indeed often tediously mundane. Yet, tedium and mundaneness are part of any long-term relationship and no less important than more photogenic moments.

To speak of valuing parenthood and children, then, we need to speak more often of those spaces between developmental milestones and Facebook status updates. And when we do, we see stark differences in the extent to which women and men participate in these everyday practices.

UNDERVALUED WORK

If we take a child’s perspective and see these acts as dominating their conscious lives, and if we recognise that these everyday gestures are a privilege of parenting, we see that many men — particularly those who do not have flexible work and time-off — face constraints and barriers as parents. This is something public policy reinforces and that it can and must address.

Extensive maternity leave and limited paternity leave creates a situation in which women and men, regardless of their desires, are compelled to become families where mothers play bigger roles than fathers by virtue of more opportunity to practice and learn.

To address this, paternity leave must be extended beyond the current one week. Particular attention should be paid to ensuring that all men — regardless of their socio-economic circumstances and job types — have access to this privilege to parent.

Caregiving is simultaneously hard work and privilege. Public policies have produced hard divisions of labour such that some do most of it — mothers, grandmothers, and for some portion of the middle-class, domestic workers.

In the process, those who do not partake in everyday care often fail to appreciate both its difficulties and its rewards. The work itself becomes devalued. Children become, paradoxically, a category of highly-valued persons whose care is often invisible and undervalued.

Policy makers frequently invoke the notion of “mindsets” as limiting their capacity to alter policy. Yet, sociologists have shown that for attitudes to change, conditions must exist for certain practices to become norms.

Employers will not spontaneously decide that they ought to support men in becoming particular types of fathers. In the abstract — not having had opportunity to acquire competence in childcare beyond changing some diapers — men will not spontaneously see that they can be different sorts of fathers.

Women, for that matter, will not believe that their male partners are indeed capable of doing everything they can do, as long as they are given time to practice. For so-called mindsets to change, conditions have to shift.

It has taken years for paternity leave to be introduced. We must keep the conversation going so that it does not take years to expand it so that it actually counts.

Teo You Yenn is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, board member at the Association of Women for Action and Research, and author of Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How family policies make state and society.

This article is published on TodayOnline, on 17 June, 2013.