To Be or Not to Be: Chinese-Singaporean Women Deliberating on Voluntary Childlessness

Abstract

This chapter reports on our study of the self-justifications and internal conversations, or self-dialogues, of 16 married Chinese-Singaporean women about their deliberations on voluntary childlessness. The sample of our study consisted of higher-skilled (H) and lower-skilled (L) women. We used the social exchange framework of Levinger (A social exchange view on the dissolution of pair relationships. In: F. I. Nye (ed) Family relationships. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982) and Chan (J Fam Econ Issues 31(3), 387–95, 2009; The Straits Times, 13 June 2010; J Asian Bus 2011) to explain these women’s justifications of their choices. More precisely, we examined how the women explained their decisions as a result of their cost–benefit analyses in the context of their perceptions of four crucial social agents: husbands, workplace, extended families, and Singapore society. Our findings show that the women’s reflections were varied and diverse. Differences stemmed from their education levels and from the multiple intersections of the women’s perceptions of their relations with their social agents. Our data yield that the women’s decisions were most strongly motivated by their attempts to arbitrate financial costs, their wishes to pursue a career, and their assessment that their husbands would not contribute much to childrearing. Purely financial considerations were more strongly expressed by the lower-skilled women, yet both groups of higher-skilled and lower-skilled women lamented that extended families and Singapore society would not provide sufficient help to alleviate their burden in child care.