Category: Marriage, Family And Children

Building Strong Families Symposium 2025 Singapore

Double-edged Sword? Do grandparents help build strong families? 

A study by Catholic Family Life found that strong families are undergirded by strong marriages. Four factors are key: family commitment, conflict resolution, marital satisfaction and family spirituality. But grandparents and intergenerational relationships could be a "double-edged sword" if values and attitudes are not aligned.
Singapore Adoption Cases

“Mom, Dad, Where Are You?” The Right to Know One’s Natural Parents 

Adoptive children have a deep desire to seek their biological parents in an effort to find themselves. It touches on deep and profound questions, involving one’s identity and origin. This right to know one’s natural parents has been recognised as a legal and moral right in Singapore.
Singapore Child Abuse Cases

Fatal Child Abuse of Megan Khung: Can we do better? 

Every child abused is one child too many. In this process of soul-searching and learning to do better in our protection of children following the death of Megan Khung, it would help to reduce the level of blame levelled at the preschool and social service agency involved. Furthermore, we should also appreciate her grandmother’s dilemmas in her response, and the wider ecosystem surrounding the incident which involved drugs and family breakdown.
Singapore Cultivate Commune Family

“Porn: What’s the Harm?”: A Cultivate Commune update

Early exposure as teenagers, double lives, impaired relationships and bumpy healing journeys: these stories marked Cultivate’s first breakfast conversation this year, on a thoroughly un-breakfast topic – Pornography. Our conversation featured Jeffrey Pang, a counsellor who handles porn addiction cases, and Jakin Tan, a university undergraduate who overcame the addiction. It was moderated by Cultivate Chairperson, Ariel Lim, with her own story of breakthrough.
Online Sexual Harms Article Singapore.

Online Sexual Harms: Why We Urgently Need More Protections

With our high digital connectivity, the lines between public and private life are often blurred or breached. This is especially serious in the context of online sexual harms, which disproportionately affect women, children and lower-income groups. More needs to be urgently done to combat online harms and protect the common good

Unfiltered – The Whole Family Conversation 2024

Cultivate’s inaugural conference, “Unfiltered – The Whole Family Conversation”, took place on 14 November 2024 at the Grassroots Club. We featured three panels on topics related to family – marriage, children and intergenerational bonds – with speakers who shared their personal and professional insights. It sought to deepen conversations on unseen and upcoming issues on these fronts.

Cultivate Commune: Success and Flourishing in Singapore

Cultivate Commune is a breakfast conversation where we explore how big ideas are planted in real community experiences. In this fourth Commune on 31 August 2024, we heard from Associate Professor (Dr) Tan Seow Hon. Joined by two panellists Su Ching and Sin Cheng, they spoke on the topic of success and flourishing in Singapore.
Singapore Dream Flourishing Cultivate Success

“Singapore Dream” Redux: Material Success, Flourishing or…?

For the longest time, the “Singapore Dream” has been about achieving material success through hard work, but attitudes are changing. In this “refreshed Singapore Dream”, is there room to focus more on human flourishing?
Lawrence Wong Singapore Prime Minister at National Day Rally

NDR 2024 – Upcoming Parental Leave Enhancements: Are They Enough?

A survey commissioned by Cultivate SG and conducted by Milieu Insight suggests that societal attitudes on parenthood and work commitments may pose a challenge to take-up rates in the increases to paternity leave and shared parental leave.
Childcare in Singapore

The Childcare Conundrum: Who to care for baby?  

Welcoming a newborn into the family is a joyous and life-changing experience, but who will take care of baby when Mum and Dad have to go back to work? In this article, we explore some options for childcare.