AWA Book Review: Unease - Life in Singapore Families (2026) by Teo You Yenn
- Mandakini Arora
- May 6
- 3 min read
Updated: May 12
By Mandakini Arora
There is unease in our garden city, official rhetoric notwithstanding.
In 2024, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said, “Singaporeans have consistently put their families as their top priority .... Let us work together to build a Singapore Made for Families ... where everyone can enjoy an enriching family life here in this Garden City we call home.”
Teo You Yenn, described by one journalist as Singapore’s sociologist-in-chief, quotes the prime minister in Unease: Life in Singapore Families. She highlights a gap between ideals and reality in a Singapore that has seen a steadily declining total fertility rate — 0.87 in 2026 (when a replacement level is 2.1).
Interviewing 92 Singaporean adults about wage work and family, Teo found a pattern. “Against the state’s idealized images of happy families and its claims of Singapore as a pro-family regime, the interior of family life chafes with unease.” Interviewees’ discussions of children were consistently couched as problems, even as they obviously treasured their children.
“Unease has a gendered face.” Women do the lion’s share of caregiving. Why, in our pro-family society, is unpaid caregiving seen as inferior to wage work? Teo asks, questioning taken-for-granted, commonsensical assumptions — e.g., men are less capable of childcare than women; tuition and enrichment activities for children are a necessity and not a choice; children entail sacrifice, particularly for women; “working mums” is part of our lexicon but not “working dads.”
Our “world-class-everything city” boasts an internationally top-notch education system. At what cost? The unease Teo encountered centered on children’s education. Children were not spoken of with joy and delight, parenting being “results-oriented and efficiency driven.” A clear indicator of the relentless pressure on parents and children is Singapore’s multimillion-dollar tuition industry.
To simply blame individual kiasu parents is facile. When various interviewees spoke in the same idiom, clearly their perspectives were informed by a shared context — “kiasu parents are not born and have to be made.” Everyone has to play the game, which is “competition and hierarchisation.” Interviewees repeated that they had no choice.
Teo is not dismissive of the remarkable accomplishments of Singapore — “a stable, predictable and well-run place.” Reality is not black or white, either/or. “People’s lives are complex — we need multiple as well as layered stories to make sense of them.”
The opposite of unease, Teo argues, without claiming a readymade solution, is agency and choice. She calls for a rethinking of the value of different activities, and a larger view of human worth than one premised solely on success measured by wealth and educational degrees.
The book is a sequel of sorts to her bestselling This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). In both, she uses her profound theoretical expertise and commitment to social justice to shine a light into lesser-explored recesses of Singapore society.
Grounded in meticulous research and elegantly written, Unease: Life in Singapore Families is a rewarding, informative read, well worth devoting time to.
 | Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews Asian books for the online AWA Magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. A collector and writer of women’s stories, she has a PhD in History from Duke University where she was a James B. Duke Fellow, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths’ College-LASALLE College of the Arts. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews at mandakinni@gmail.com |
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