Launch of the SingaNews portal

SINGAPORE – The SingaNews portal was unveiled last Wednesday during a breakfast session at Kum Yan Methodist Church. The online news portal is a social enterprise venture, which initially sought funds from the Christian community. Although the funding came from the Christian community, Mr Matthew Yap, the managing director, publisher and editor-in-chief hopes that the news portal will be a secular one, and will be able to garner the support from the other faiths.

Regardless of how SingaNews will turn out, the fact remains that everyone is entitled to his democratic right of religious expression; the Christian community is entitled to its right to set up a Christian portal which expouses the Christian perspective on sociopolitical issues, ditto for the Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu religious communities. Shravasti Dhammika, a Buddhist monk for 32 years and spiritual advisor to the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society maintains a blog in which he regularly comments on the happenings around Singapore and elsewhere, albeit from the Buddhist perspective. In fact, having multiple religious portals which share the religious perspectives of sociopolitical issues might help foster greater understanding between practitioners of different religions and hopefully result in greater empathy for one another.

According to Mr Yap, SingaNews will be written from the perspective of mainstream family values, a term he defined as a “generational, natural family that focuses on procreation”, which he emphasized is a man, his wife, both with a view to procreate. Majority would agree with Mr Yap that the nucleus of a family would comprise heterosexual parents. To state the obvious, heterosexuals constitute the majority of any society including ours, and they would go on to set up families. Such is a given fact, and a common occurence in any culture and society.

Whilst the heterosexuality of parents and their participation in pro-creation is a fact of family life, the challenge still lies in maintaining the cohesion within the family unit. A couple has a son, who went on marry and have his own son. The question is how often would three generations of that family get together to have a meal together? With children opting to send their parents to nursing homes, the opportunity for all three generations to get together becomes rarer still.

The challenge does not end there. The modern day parent, both mother and father, have their careers to tend to. Thus, the challenge they face is how to balance their careers with raising a healthy family at the same time. Dr. Jody Heymann, founder of the Harvard-based Project on Global Working Families and Director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, produced a groundbreaking study devoted to understanding how globalization is affecting working families around the world. The Project on Global Working Families at Harvard was the first program devoted to understanding and improving the relationship between working conditions and family health and well-being throughout the world.

The results of Dr Heymann’s studies may be a cause for concern.

1) In 66 percent of the families where parents had to leave children home alone or with an unpaid child, the children suffered accidents or other emergencies.

2) In 35 percent of the same cases, the children had suffered from developmental or behavioral problems.

3) Working conditions that allowed parents to take leave from work – either due to paid leave or flexibility – halved the risk of parents having to leave children home alone sick. Fifteen percent of parents who had either flexibility or paid leave for childcaring had to leave children home alone sick, compared to 29 percent of parents who had neither paid leave nor flexibility.

Procreation by heterosexual parents in the creation of a family unit is stating the obvious, and is really a non-issue. The issue which isn’t really obvious to all is how to provide a healthy environment for the children to grow healthily in today’s context when both parents have to tend to their careers. That is when one starts appreciating the biblical verse from Proverbs 22:6 (English Standard Version)

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

The challenge for both parents is how to “train the child in the way he should go” whilst managing their careers at the same time.