What do you see in this punchline?
Apparently, we see an elated man sitting in between a pair of indifferent married couples. However, this punchline is actually applying nonverbal communication to illustrate something deeper than what it meets the eye. It is interesting to discover that through the application of nonverbal communication, we are able to pick up the little details to draw comprehensive conclusion.
Let us first look at the big picture by observing its objectics – the study of how meanings are conveyed through physical objects. Looking at the environment object, specifically the double-sized bed, we intuitively understand that it is a personal territory which is only reserved for married couples. However, this personal space is invaded by an unwelcomed outsider. Furthermore, as we look into the area of proxemics, the study of space and distance, it explains that an intimate zone is supposes to be enjoyed by the couple only. Clearly, this punchline is displaying a distancing of the couple caused by the man in the center. Also, viewing at this picture upfront, there is a huge contrast of the physical appearance in terms of the dressing between the couple in their pajamas and the man in his blazer. Up to this point, we can conclude that the smartly dressed person is representing our government who is confident about its Baby Bonus Policy. By extending the maternity leave from 12 weeks to 16 weeks and ensuring that employer pays the mother maternity benefits, our government is showing that it is taking care of the mother. As it provides one week or two consecutive week paternity leave, it is encouraging the father to support his wife after the baby is born. On top of providing day offs, it offers cash gift of $3,000 each for their 1st and 2nd child and $6,000 each for their 3rd and 4th child.
Having the general idea in mind, we shall further examine the details. In the study of body movement, kinesics, the couple expressed their unhappiness by folding their arms. It could be that the provision of cash merely connotes a payment for a task performed by the wedded, when rearing a child is totally not about executing an assignment. Their affect displays are complemented by their facial displays where the couples intensify their emotions with their frowning lips. Through observing their eye movement, oculesics, it further indicates negative emotions and it signals their unwillingness to relate to each other.
After realizing the non-involvement of most married couples, it really brought me thinking about the root of their reasons. It could be due to the after-effect of our previous policies in the 1970s where people are exposed to slogans like “We have attained a high standard of living. Let’s keep it.” Furthermore, Singapore is a rapidly developing country where we live in a society of a relatively high stress level. As such, most of our working class focus on moving up the career ladder and neglect their social life. Also, as our cost of living increases, the cost of upbringing escalates. How much does it cost to provide for a child’s daily expenses, education fees, medical fees, and their extra wants in which they demand from their parents when they enter into their adolescent stage? More support is definitely needed than just having leaves from workplace and receiving cash. Looking from the angle of the Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs), it is a daunting task to find replacement for pregnant women and at the same time keeping their production uninterrupted. Hence, employers may hesitate to employ them or might even lay them off. To reduce on those uncertainties, those women may come to a decision to postpone or not to give birth at all.
Perhaps there is more to be done to come up with supportive policies where working mothers can safely stay at home, yet not affecting the productivity of the companies. At the same time, there could be more parent and child support measures that relief the cost of rearing children over the course of the years.
A businessman once commented, “Having a child is an investment that loses money.” This mindset is ought to be changed. Our government could apply nonverbal communication to execute more policies by stop talking about it and support parentage through action instead.
14 comments:
The social issue about low birth rate is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon worldwide and not just limited to Singapore. It is caused by a shift in mindset of having children. However, the push factor for this shift in mindset is the accelerating rate at which the world is revolving at. In a bid to keep up with the rising standards of living, the populace is more focused on their material comforts than building up a family.
The Singapore government has put in place many monetary incentives to encourage the population to give birth to more babies. This has proven to reap no significant results. Alternatively, measures such as using nonverbal communications to convey their message alongside incentives may bring forth a greater impact.
All in all, it depends largely on the individuals decisions as it is a subjective issue. However, if the government wishes to change their school of thought to manufacture more labourers for the country, than they should stop treating it's people as babies-production factories. They should try their best not to convey such a message as it will deter more couples from conceiving. Maybe it's time to change their tactics after failed attempts of incentives?
I agree with the author that the low birth rate could be partly due to the after-effect of our previous policy in the 1970s. Due to the high birth rate in 1960s, family planning campaign posters produced between 1974-1983 to educate public on the advantages of small families and "stop at two" was the official slogan. Though the family program was revised in 1986 to encourage Singaporean to have more children but the mindset of having small families has already been rooted in most of us. Hence, I would say the previous policies have been very successfully executed. To change the mindset of Singaporeans, more efforts need to be done. Monetary incentives and maternity leaves are not enough to encourage people to have more babies.
The Singapore government's plan to encourage couples to have more babies is not going to be effective in the long run.
1. Rising costs and higher inflation. Enough said.
2. In my honest opinion, it is not about extending the maternity leave from 12 weeks to 16 weeks, it is about whether the new mother is willing to use up all that leave.
Because in that period of 16 weeks, the company has to find some one to replace the responsibilities carried out by the new mother. In that 16 weeks, there is a possibility that the company may actually prefer the new employee than the new mother. Yes, under the law, the company cannot fire the new mother (that will be discrimination), but the company can start giving more important responsibilities to the new employee rather than the new mother. The company will practice this form of favoritism until the mother resigns herself.
And if the new mother works for an SME, I won't be surprised the new mother gets fired within 2 months after her return from her 16 weeks maternity leave. The truth is, a lot of SMEs cannot afford to do so.
From the way I see it, the new policy will only be attractive for those women who work for government agencies/departments.
The birth rate issue has definitely been a concern for our govt to think of further incentives to motivate couples to have children and more children.
However, besides using external attractions to motivate, i wonder if there is anything beneath that can be done, like the values that nowadays couples have with regards to family. For besides the financial factor, couples may consider other factors which are of concern, one could be: "am i able to raise my kids well?", "can i be a good parent?"
Perhaps another approach for the govt would be to let ppl see the value of family =)
Alright… I’ve heard too many comments on the government’s shortcomings in this area of population planning, and I think I would like to give my two-bit worth in casting them in a fair light.
While it's all too easy to see the apparent fallacies in the government policies of the past (especially with regards to population-control), and to snigger at their current seemingly-feeble attempts to repair the damage, one often neglects the fact that population demography is a dynamic aspect of a country, more so in a developing one like ours.
If one is well-acquainted with population pyramids and the demographic transition model, there would be little doubt as to why the government did what they did in past and the present. Back then, the post-war boomers strained out the meagre resources of our thriving republic at a rate that superseded our capabilities to keep up. We needed a radical population policy, and we needed it fast. Perhaps the government underestimated the far-reaching effects of enacting population-control measures of that magnitude back then. But the immediate effects were undeniably present. We balanced off our resource deficits fairly quickly while juggling on a tight rope of diminishing total fertility index. A dangerous gamble, albeit a necessary one.
Now that we’ve enjoyed the immediate benefits to the full-extent, we begin to look at the relentless spiral of our total fertility index and wonder if the government’s population-control polices had over-compensated. (I think it’s unfair to use ‘backfired’ in this case because we did have a honey-moon phase when equilibrium was attained). Again, while it’s pretty easy for us to criticise the desperate attempts of the government to keep in pace with the population trend, subconsciously attributing this to a gross lack of insight, we fail to note the blatant fact that population dynamics is, by definition, dynamic. Measures to curb or promote growth are in response to trends, not to speculations. We can establish birth-control policies, but there’s little we can predict about how the population at large will respond. Who knows? If Singaporeans weren’t quite as ‘kiasu’ and ‘kia-zeng-hu’ (scared of government), the population policies might not have worked out at all, and we might still be struggling with overpopulation!
Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not saying all these to encourage promiscuous procreation!
Quite the contrary, I think every child is a gift from God. The colossal decision to bring a life into the world shouldn’t be reduced to mere population indices nor nullified in gravity by alluring financial incentives.
But having said that, I think we should give credit to the government for their justified attempts in edging in their opinions, even in intimate matters on the matrimony bed!
Well,
Having seen the existing comments, we can see that there are really 2 sides of a coin.
As commoners, we would view the baby bonus policy as ineffective. However, it may be because that the effect of the policy have not yet taken place.
Time will tell whether the government is really effective in increasing birth rates in the 21st century, just like how they did it back in the 1970s.
It's happening in every developed country in the world. The better educated we become and the more we invest in our careers, the less time we actually allocate to our families.
this mentality will ever be present and i seriously doubt giving monetary incentives will encourage couples to start larger families. what could be done instead would be to illustrate the joys of having a bigger family
According to a paper by Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), fertility decisions are still chiefly made by the female, until 1983, social changes in education and working force resulted in the emergence of categorisation of women into two types: the educated and the less educated. The educated women were the ‘elite’ women whom the institution, with selective incentives, encouraged to increase level of reproduction.
In the 1983 National Day Address by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew revealed the state’s stand on the less educated women giving birth as an act which would decrease the nation’s intellectual ability and undermine Singapore’s international competitiveness. This undermined the importance of less educated women and their children: the Small Families Improvement Scheme announced in 1993 by then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong meant that mothers from low income families educated below a certain level of attainment and under 35 would be given a housing grant of $800 each year for twenty years. This policy meant that parents of low income and education level must only have two children or cease to be eligible for financial assistance. These policies point to an institutionalised discrimination against low income and less educated parents having children, imbuing a value system in Singaporeans that poor families are inferior to the rich not just materially, but as part of the nation.
This economic factor causes a psychological impact on Singaporeans who inherit the eugenicist belief that intelligence is hereditary.
Thus, the Singapore nation gradually cultures itself to think that only certain (rich and smart) people should have children. This in turn causes the physical effect that the marriage age is delayed (thus a higher age for conception) as Singaporeans become more pragmatic and achievement-driven. Since they believe that only the rich and smart deserve children, becoming rich and smart is now the condition for couples to provide a conducive environment for their children to grow up to be successful. That is why people are not giving.
Here's another reason. Due to the emancipation of women and the state policies, Singaporeans internalise the ideology of meritocracy and inculcate the culture of pragmatism. This does not only affect women, but also men. Therefore, it is important to look at the emergence of the “me” society in Singapore as a whole and how it has resulted in the trend of decreasing fertility rate.
A television programme Maybe Baby broadcasted on Channel News Asia purports that Singapore is facing a phenomenon known as the “me” society. It is defined as a society where members are selfish, thinking only for the benefits of themselves. In this sense, the increasing phenomenon of a “me” society can be accounted for the decreasing fertility rate in Singapore. Individualism and material aspirations have become pervasive due to the convergence of historical, political and economic factors since Singapore gained independence in 1965. Meritocracy and pragmatism, which were deliberately inculcated by the government for the sole purpose of nation building, have become principles that Singaporeans live by. The pursuit of economic excellence and rewards in the past 43 years has resulted in a new generation of Singaporeans who hold different values to life.
The new generation of Singaporeans is individualistic and materialistic. Their objectives revolve around what they can achieve for themselves. Unlike Singaporeans surveyed in 1972, when marriage was regarded as a preferred condition for personal fulfillment and motherhood as an important aspect of adult identity, they no longer hold on to the traditional values of family life. Marriage and child-bearing have taken a back seat in their lives because these are not considered as personal achievements. Instead, lifestyle, career and life’s comforts take priority. This new generation of Singaporeans are constantly striving for career achievements and personal well-being and children are regarded as obstacles to achieving these lifestyles. They do not want to have to worry about their children in the process of achieving their personal goals. As such, less are willing to give birth.
Plus, where is the paternity leave? It is no wonder that baby bonus is not evidently successful.
To Michelle:
Actually there is paternity leave in the baby bonus scheme. In fact, I think there is about 2-3 weeks of paternity leave.
Birth rate issues... Hmmm... Since it's a blog, I'll take it from a personal perspective rather than a social one. I personally would like to take this back home and look at it as a family problem rather than the big picture of a country as a whole.
To me, it's very straight-forward. Raised in a family of traditional chinese values, it's only right to have children. It's not a problem of incentives or not. Besides, it's natural to ensure the continued existence of our species as human beings. I've said it here.
I do agree that birth rate are affecting alot of developed countries like Japan and Singapore. And I also know that government is also quite worried about Singaporeans getting married at the age of 30s, hence having fewer babies. However, low birth rate can be due to the rising cost of living, and everyone is trying to focus on their careers so that they can save up more before having children. Looking at the cost of milk powder, school fees, the prices are always rising and parents will have to pay more, therefore, some families will rather have only 1 child or at most 2 children.
And I have to say that monetary incentives will not work on some married couples to encourage them to have children. After having children, the couple need to pay attention to the children's need and there is also other responsibilities involved. In additional, the couples may also have work responsiblity and since the demand at work is also quite large, the couples may not have time to spend time with the children.
Therefore, government should change their tactics in order to encourage couples to have children.
I'm sure it is not easy for the government to really please everyone about this birth rate issue.
Nevertheless, looking at the various methods that our government has adopted, i'm sure they are addressing this issue. It really depends on us to whether we are willing to heed their advices.
A very good analysis of the cartoon indeed.
Would like to say that perhaps the distancing of the couple is already present and the man representing the government may be trying to bring the couple together.
The stress on couples in the modern society is huge and perhaps a better way in trying to solve the root problem should be sought.
adding on to what bingo has mentioned about paternity leave....i want to confirm that new dads are definitely entitled to both paternity and no-pay leaves......moving on....as much as i agree that rising cost may potentially be one of the reason why couples are discouraged from creating new life, we cannot discount the fact that the government are actually trying to rectify this issue. Greater problems like aging population are looming....so unless bukit timah is sitting on a large gold mine or if the seabed at sentosa has a great wealth of crude oil where we can tap into...sad to say...our only asset is human capital....having sad that, i personally feel that the onus lies on married couples.. ...the future of our nation lies in their hands.
-ray
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