This chapter concludes the book. Singapore’s family and population policies are integral to its post-colonial nation building strategies. The evolution of the family system is by no means a linear extrapolation of the western families but rather a complex interplay among modernization, ethnic & religious culture, and the strong influence of public policies. The relevance of major theoretical frameworks for explaining global family changes is evaluated in the context of Singapore’s experience since independence. I also discuss future challenges and policy implications for Singapore families and population.

This article examines representations of fathers and fatherhood in the advertising campaigns of Singaporean government agencies. The introduction of paternity leave and encouragement for fathers to play a bigger role in childcare and child-raising suggest that the government is sympathetic to the pursuit of gender equality, but I argue that state advocacy of active fatherhood serves to reinforce patriarchal tendencies in Singapore. Current scholarship on the problematization of women in state discourses has highlighted the power and privilege of a particular social group in Singapore: heterosexual men. However, there has been a developing body of theoretical and empirical research that looks more critically at the discursive constructions of masculinities, particularly along the dimensions of class, race, and sexuality. This article takes up this issue of different masculinities and the implications this diversity has for understanding patriarchal culture and its intersecting hierarchies. I propose the concept of Confucian masculinity to explain how the depiction of active fatherhood reinforces the ubiquitous “normal family” that upholds patriarchal ideology and perpetuates patriarchal power, thereby obscuring the contradictions of class, race, and sexuality that exist in Singapore.

This article provides an overview of the key aspects of the changes occurred in Singapore’s population and families during the last half a century, highlights the critical public policies that help shape the evolution, and identifies the challenges that Singapore’s family and population trends pose for its future development. We also noted several theoretical frameworks for global family changes that guide our analysis and provide an outline for the chapters in this book.

This chapter focuses on a particular group of transnational families in Singapore – those formed through the marital union of a Singapore citizen and a non-resident (i.e. non-citizen, non-permanent resident) at the point of marriage. Using anecdotal evidence collected through in-depth interviews with 47 transnational divorced individuals, this chapter examines one, the cultural meanings of family, marriage and divorce these respondents brought to their transnational marriages; two, the cultural expectations they held of their marriage partner; and finally, the cross-cultural family practices these transnational families constructed. The chapter discusses how broader global and local structures and processes shape these meanings, expectations and practices in transnational spaces, and therefore bring about the respondents' situational responses and strategies. At the same time, the findings also reveal the issues and struggles the respondents encountered during the transnational marriage that eventually led to marital breakdown and dissolution.

Limited research has examined parental emotion socialization across Asian cultural contexts. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of family change and self-construal, this study examined cultural orientation toward independence-interdependence, parental emotion socialization processes, and their relations with adolescents’ psychological adjustment across three Asian cultural contexts—rural families in South India, suburban families in China, and families in Singapore. Participants included 300 Indian adolescents (Mage = 15.58 years; 57.3% male) and their parents, 310 Chinese adolescents (Mage = 13.04 years; 46.3% female) and their parents, and 241 Singaporean adolescents (Mage = 14.44 years; 48.3% female) and their parents. Both adolescents and parents completed self-report measures of cultural orientation and emotion socialization, and adolescents completed a measure of their psychological adjustment. We first established construct validation for two emotion socialization processes and found that the factor structure for parental reactions varied across Asian contexts and parent versus adolescent reports, while the factor structure for parental emotion expressivity varied only across informants. Second, we tested whether the two parental emotion socialization processes mediated the association between cultural orientation toward independence-interdependence and adolescent behavior problems, and found differential relations across the three Asian contexts. Our data supported the model of family change and showed that across the Asian societies, the variations in independence-interdependence orientation provide different models of parental emotion socialization with nuances in meaning and function, as revealed by the construct validation of parental reactions and emotional expressivity and their implications for adolescents’ socio-emotional functioning. © The Author(s) 2021.

In 1980, only 27 per cent of Singapore’s households were categorized as being dual-income earning. By 2015, the dual-earner married couples had increased to 53.8 per cent. Among the Malay population, the female labour force participation rate has also increased markedly from 17.9 per cent in 1970 to 47.9 per cent in 2010. However, studies done in the 1980s and 1990s found that despite more married Malay women entering the workforce, the retention of traditional pattern of gender roles, with husbands inclined to do the ‘provider’ roles and wives the ‘nurturing’ roles, seemed to have prevailed. Our study revisits the conditions of present-day Malay households to investigate if there are some newer changes to the gender roles pattern. It has been found that while there are small shifts in practices of sharing household and childcaring tasks in Malay dual-income households, perceptions pertaining to notions of ‘different’ or ‘complimentary’ women’s and men’s work continue to define marital relations within the home. For the Malay family, the exercise of ‘maternal gatekeeping’ and conformity to an ‘Ideal Muslim’ marital couple strongly underpin the nature of gender roles within the household.