Last week, while scrolling through my phone on the MRT, I stumbled upon yet another online debate that seemed to have caught fire across Singapore. The question was simple, but like all simple questions, it carried the weight of something much larger: should childcare centres extend their operating hours so that parents who work late can pick up their children later?
At first glance, the argument sounds reasonable. Life is busy. Work ends late. Traffic happens. Meetings run overtime. Emails multiply like rabbits. If parents cannot reach the childcare centre by closing time, perhaps the childcare centre should simply stay open longer.
Problem solved.
Except… it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?
It only moves the problem somewhere else.
Because if childcare centres extend their hours, someone else must stay back longer. The teachers. The assistants. The cooks. The cleaners. The people who also have homes to return to, families to care for, dinners to cook, elderly parents to check on, and maybe even their own children waiting for them.
So the question quietly shifts from “Should childcare centres open longer?” to something more uncomfortable: whose time exactly are we extending?
This debate fascinates me because it reveals something deeply Singaporean about the way we approach work and time. For decades, we have inherited a philosophy that quietly equates long working hours with reliability. The last person to leave the office is often perceived as the most committed. The one replying emails at 11.47pm must surely be the most hardworking.
We admire stamina.
We reward presence.
But we rarely question efficiency.
Somewhere along the way, productivity became confused with endurance. Work became less about completing a task and more about occupying time.
I once worked in an office where people stayed back until 8pm almost every day. Not because the workload demanded it, but because nobody wanted to be the first person to leave. The moment someone packed their bag at 6pm, you could almost feel the room quietly judging them.
“Half-day ah?”
It didn’t matter that the person had completed all their work. What mattered was the optics of staying.
This is the strange theatre of modern work culture. Everyone performs busyness.
And like all theatre, the performance continues because the audience expects it.
Now this brings us back to childcare centres. When parents are unable to pick up their children on time, the immediate instinct is to stretch the childcare hours. Extend the closing time. Add a buffer. Give parents more flexibility.
But perhaps we should ask a different question instead.
Why are parents working so late in the first place?
Singapore is not exactly a sleepy town. Our work culture is famously intense. Many employees officially end work at 6pm, but “official” and “actual” are two very different things. Meetings start late in the day. Messages arrive after dinner. Some offices operate on the quiet expectation that if the boss is still around, everyone else should also still be around.
It is the unspoken rule of proximity.
So when a parent rushes across the island trying to reach a childcare centre before closing time, the problem might not be the childcare centre’s schedule. The problem might be the entire structure of the workday.
Other countries have already begun questioning this structure. Experiments with shorter work weeks have been conducted in places like Iceland, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe. The results have been surprisingly consistent.
Work output did not collapse.
Companies did not fall apart.
In many cases, productivity actually increased.
When people know they have less time to work, they tend to focus more sharply. Meetings become shorter. Emails become clearer. Unnecessary bureaucracy begins to shrink. The workday becomes leaner because it has to be.
Human attention, it turns out, functions a little like a battery. It drains over time. Stretch it too long and the later hours become filled with half-thinking and slow decision-making. Tasks that could have taken twenty minutes begin to take an hour.
Anyone who has stared at a spreadsheet at 6.45pm knows this feeling. Your brain is technically still present, but your spirit has already boarded the MRT.
This is why the argument for shorter working hours is not just about comfort or lifestyle. It is about efficiency.
A tired workforce is not a productive workforce.
A distracted workforce is not an efficient workforce.
And a society that normalises exhaustion eventually pays for it in ways that are not always immediately visible.
Burnout.
Health issues.
Strained family relationships.
Children who spend more time waiting than being with their parents.
Which brings us back to the childcare debate again.
If we keep extending childcare hours, we may be quietly accepting a reality where parents simply work later and later. The childcare centre becomes a buffer zone for a system that refuses to change.
Instead of adjusting the structure of work, we stretch the structure of care.
The irony is almost poetic.
The people caring for children must now sacrifice more time with their own families so that other families can cope with longer work hours.
It becomes a chain of borrowed time.
Now, to be fair, there are parents whose jobs genuinely demand irregular hours. Healthcare workers, security personnel, transport operators, and many others keep society running at odd hours. For them, extended childcare services can be necessary and meaningful support.
But that is different from designing an entire system around late work as the norm.
The danger lies in normalising the exception.
If the baseline assumption becomes that everyone works late, then the solution will always be to stretch the support systems further. Longer childcare hours. Later school buses. More evening programmes.
At some point, we might accidentally design a society where childhood itself becomes a waiting room.
Children waiting for parents.
Parents waiting for weekends.
Everyone waiting for time.
The funny thing is, Singaporeans are actually very efficient people. Put us under pressure and we become incredibly resourceful. Deadlines sharpen our instincts. Constraints often bring out creativity.
Give someone three hours to finish something and they will probably finish it.
Give them eight hours and suddenly the task expands to fill the entire day.
This phenomenon even has a name: Parkinson’s Law. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
If this is true, then stretching the workday does not necessarily produce better work. It might simply produce longer work.
And longer work does not always mean meaningful work.
I sometimes imagine what would happen if Singapore collectively decided that the standard workday should end earlier. Not dramatically earlier. Just enough to change the rhythm of the evening.
Imagine parents leaving offices at 5pm instead of 6.30pm.
Imagine children being picked up without the frantic rush.
Imagine dinners that are not squeezed between emails.
Imagine teachers and childcare workers returning home while the sun is still negotiating with the sky.
It sounds almost radical, which is amusing because in many parts of the world, this is not radical at all. It is simply normal life.
Of course, cultural habits do not change overnight. Work culture is like an old sofa. Even when it becomes uncomfortable, people hesitate to replace it because everyone is used to sitting on it.
But every now and then, a debate appears that invites us to question the furniture.
The childcare hours discussion might be one of those moments.
Instead of asking how late childcare centres should remain open, perhaps we should be asking how early people should be allowed to return home.
Instead of stretching care systems indefinitely, perhaps we should redesign work systems more thoughtfully.
Because if the goal is truly to support families, then the answer might not lie in longer childcare hours.
The answer might lie in shorter workdays.
And who knows? We might even discover that when people are given back a little time, they become better workers, better parents, and possibly even happier citizens.
Which, if we are honest, sounds like a very efficient outcome.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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