Category: Social Issues

People always try to do what is best for their children. Good children are a result of good parenting, is what people often say. However, people have always struggled to raise children and have also tried hard to understand what makes a good parent. In Singapore, it is true that raising children has become increasingly difficult because of technology and also because more parents are working longer hours.

People who believe that raising children today is easier, often argue that parents today have a lot of assistance. It is especially true in Singapore, where the government has come up with various policies that help people in their journey of parenthood. Earlier, parents were supposed to take care of their children’s need by working extra hours or working on weekends. They did not get assistance for raising good children. However today, government policies assist parents the moment a child is born. These policies include cash bonuses¸ medical benefits in case the child or the mother gets sick and even benefits on library and basic transportation benefits. The Singapore Government offers all these grants and policies to ensure that parents raise good and healthy children.  Being assisted financially for children’s education or healthcare has helped parents significantly. Based on this factor, one can agree that parenting today is easier than earlier times, at least in terms of needs like education and healthcare.  

With the advent of technology parents, today get enough guidance through various websites, blogs and columns on multiple aspects of parenting. Parents today can discuss whatever bothers them with other parents on parental forums and Facebook pages. Parents often follow these websites to seek answers about their children’s well-being. In Singapore, these websites do not disappoint, either. For example, websites like smartparents.sg guides parents on aspects like the health of the child, their education, suggestions about schools and activities, and also on aspects like their diet and nutrition. Similarly, the Kiasu Parents website is like a social media platform for parents. On this website, parents can interact with other parents and get parental advice on educational and enrichment programmes. These websites include tips from experts in the field of child psychology and early childhood care. Parents can follow advice on these websites, blogs and forums to become a good enough parent for their child. Thus, technologically, people are more equipped to become a good parent than in the past, where parents relied on advice from their parents or friends.

Despite all these advantages, parents today increasingly face difficulties in raising their children. With economic development and growth, Singaporeans are working more than 45 hours a week.  Working long hours in Singapore has been a time-honoured tradition and the work obligation does not allow parents to spend enough time with their children. Even on weekends, parents are occupied with household chores and office work. So, while they may be physically present, they are mentally absent and technology can be blamed for this disconnect between parents and children. Parents also have a tendency to reply to work emails and go through work-related documents while at the dinner table. It is thus evident that the availability of smartphones and tablets have disrupted the work-life balance and have made life harder for parents and children. Thus, good parenting in Singapore is more challenging today than ever before parents are struggling with work and home.

Mass media is another reason, why parents are struggling to raise good children. The media today has penetrated every corner of our lives. Media today comes in forms of mobiles, laptops, television or newspapers. Parents today are using media to parent their children; this is evident from the fact that children from a very young age are given phones. By giving children access to phones and tablets at a very young age parents make an attempt to distract them and keep them busy. However, unbeknownst to them it has a severe impact on the parent-child relationship. Parents who allow children to use video streaming channels like Youtube, do not realise that the autoplay function may play related or unrelated videos which may have a negative effect on the children. For older kids, inappropriate content, violence and substance abuse are promoted repetitively in the mass media. Though these ideas might not be what the parents believe in they come at blame for allowing children to use these technologies. Therefore, good parenting today is more difficult due to media which threatens the well-being of children and exposes them to wrong ideas.

With changing times, the definition of good parents has changed significantly. While parents in the past had the liberty to take a more relaxed approach towards parenting. Parents today do not have that liberty. Today being a good parent means not only to be involved in academics but also take care of the activities they take up at school, hobbies they pursue and also their playtime. While parents today have access to various websites and blogs, which have assisted them. These same websites and blogs have also led to severe confusion in parents who get different views on various websites. In Singapore, this has led parents to become more competitive and has led them to enrol their children in various enrichment classes. Thus, with the bar set so high, parents are expected to wear multiple hats and raise their kids. Hence, it is evident that raising children is very difficult today in present times.

In conclusion, the concept of good parenting has completely been redefined in present times. With access to Mass media in various forms and Long working hours, parents today have lesser time to spend with their children. Though the government has assisted parents by providing them grants and bonuses for raising children. It cannot be denied that good parenting is still very difficult in Singapore.

I have a friend who you might say is a poster-child for the animal rights movement; aggressively vegan and ceaselessly championing the cause of the ethical treatment of animals. She tirelessly argues that all life is precious, that causing suffering is cruel and immoral, and that, therefore, animals should be afforded essentially the same rights as humans. She is not alone of course; from public organisations like Greenpeace and PETA to the grassroots level of your average man-on-the-street, our society has evolved to embrace a greater level of compassion for non-human animals than we previously possessed. The public outrage over the recent illegal killing of Cecil the lion is only the most recent articulation of our apparent love for animals (counter-accusations of hypocrisy or misjudged priorities regarding humanitarian crises in places like Syria notwithstanding). It is perhaps understandable then that movements like veganism and the broader animal rights cause have swollen in popularity over recent years. A study by analysts Mintel in 2014 found that 1 in 8 UK adults now identifies as vegetarian, ditching meat and fish entirely. Many of these same people would also argue that the best way to protect our animal brethren is to afford them the same rights as humans enjoy. I don’t entirely disagree with the logic employed by such arguments, but I do not believe that animals should have the same right to life as humans, largely because I disagree with the essential premises and definitions that underpin these views.

The concept of ‘rights’ entails an appreciation of their moral value, something animals are incapable of doing. We have ideas of ‘rights’ and their application because we are moral beings, free to choose, with an awareness of right and wrong and the capacity to override our baser urges because of this. Animals are not moral beings, they are instinctual; they act on impulse and the desire for survival, comfort, and procreation. The human right to life is a manifestation and application of our moral belief in the value of life. To extend this same right to animals would be to devalue it, as animals are unable to engage with the concept in the same way. If we were to extend this right to animals, we would be forced to look at the males in Cecil’s newly leaderless pride who will kill his cubs in order to stand a better chance of mating with the lionesses with the same sense of moral abhorrence as we would a man who murders a woman’s children and then has sex with her, to say nothing of the woman who would willingly go to bed with such a man. It is understandable to view all life as precious and want to protect animals from harm, but there is simply no logical connection between that idea and extended a ‘right to life’ to animals. The popularity of such views perhaps exists due to our increasing awareness and sympathy for the plight of animals has become more ubiquitous, while true critical thought and logic have remained (unfortunately) the remit of a privileged few in their ivory towers. This shows us then, that there is no convincing logical connection between our desire to protect animals and the extension of a ‘right to life’ to them. This, coupled with the implications of such an idea if we do accept it regardless, is a primary reason why animals should not be afforded such a right.

The other side of this coin is the idea of moral responsibility, inevitably coupled with rights, which we equally cannot afford to extend to animals. It is a fact all too often forgotten in our modern, entitled society that our moral rights do not exist in isolation, but rather that we have our part to play in preserving the moral well-being of our society as well. To award animals, the same rights as humans in any way is to force upon them the same expectations of moral responsibility as we expect of fellow human beings. As previously mentioned, animals are not capable of critical thought; they have no concept of morality and are thus incapable of following moral laws. It would be unfair of us to expect animals to conform to the same standards as we do. We may say ‘bad dog’ when Fido bites the postman or defecates in the street, but we do not mean ‘bad’ in the same way as when we say ‘murder is bad’, because it would be ridiculous to equate the two. Considering the further implications of such an idea, we would be effectively condemning a vast number of species to extinction. To forbid the predator from hunting due to its prey’s ‘right to life’ is just as silly as it sounds. It is not hard to see how unfair, and when the consequences are considered, how ridiculous extending the right to life to animals would be.

Rights have to be taken, defended, and cannot be given and animals are incapable of doing this. To quote the late comedian George Carlin, ‘They aren’t rights if someone can take them away.’ I am inclined to agree. The concept of rights is one that has developed over a very long time, from the Israelites beginning to think that perhaps Egyptian slavery was not their destined lot in life, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our thinking continually evolves. As such, it makes little sense to include the animal kingdom in our view of the ‘right to life’.

These are some of the reasons – among many – for why I do not favour the idea of animals sharing the right to life. It would be unfair though not to consider what value treating animals as if they had this same right might have, and I do not discard the idea entirely.

We cannot discount the scale of environmental challenges we as a society face today, when faced with the extinction of so many species, perhaps treating animal life with the same respect we do human life is a viable strategy. In order to preserve biodiversity, which after all is in our best interests too, we must do more to protect endangered species. While we may be different from the rest of nature we are not entirely separate from it, our fate is as entwined with the rest of the biosphere as any other species, albeit not as fragile. It is important for us to preserve and protect animal species as much as we can, for our own sake, and this entails inherent respect for these lives. Quite simply, we need nature more than nature needs us. Our food, the materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicine. In the future, we may need resources for things we don’t yet know drawn from species we are unaware of the existence of that we may already be unknowingly wiping out. Perhaps then there is value in treating the lives of some endangered species with the same respect we treat human lives, even if we do not go as far as an objective ‘right to life’.

Furthermore, the barrier between human and non-human life is becoming increasingly slim, and so less obvious how different animal life is to our own. The philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer (arguably the father of the modern animal rights movement) has spent much of his life working to erode the division between human and non-human life, and therefore, the division in value. Life is life, he argues, regardless of whether it is human or animal, and should be treated with the same degree of value. “The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval,” says Singer, and indeed some modern neuroscience supports this notion (perhaps minus the idea of sanctity). In fact, I do feel an affinity for this argument. Many times I have met the gaze of a gorilla or other higher primate through the bars of a zoo (often such animals live in captivity because they are so endangered in the wild) and on seeing the all-too-human glint in their eyes something in me rails against the idea that these creatures, so close to us in so many ways, should live cage. I understand that this is an experience shared by many.  The line of what defines ‘consciousness’ is yet to be drawn, but perhaps in the future, as our understanding of brain and mind develops, there may be a case for an animal right to life. To further quote Peter Singer, “What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”

This is undeniably a difficult and contentious issue. My great-grandchildren may judge me, but the question of rights is a hard enough one to apply only to humans, let alone animals. But if it is indeed ‘rights’ we are talking about, it seems my core philosophical understanding of what is involved in such a concept is what precludes me from believing a right to life can be extended to animals.

Some argue that everyone’s opinions are equally valuable because every human is equal and different. This is based on the ideal of the democratic process, where everyone’s opinions are given equal weight, and this collective wisdom is used to arrive at a reasonable decision or output. Such can be applied to a democratic voting process, where all citizens above a certain age are eligible to vote to decide a government, to the voting for a contestant in a talent competition, to the eyewitness identifications of a suspect, or even to simple, everyday affairs such as deciding on the place for lunch. Because every person is different and unique in their own way, and have different preferences and perspectives, they come from various viewpoints that may all be important for a certain matter at hand. For instance, a classic example that illustrates the effectiveness of collective intelligence is English statistician Sir Francis Galton’s 1907 observation of a contest in which villagers attempted to guess the weight of an ox. Although not one of the 787 estimates was correct, the average of the guessed weights was a mere one-pound short of the animal’s recorded heft. Since each person adds or contributes to the process in this own different/unique way, each opinion is of equal value and is equally considered for the enhanced, most comprehensive consensus/decision to be made.

However, in reality, while it is true that opinions are different, the accuracy of the opinion is also an important factor in deciding its value. Hence, not all opinions are equally valuable. Specifically, those given by people who are supposed to be more knowledgeable/professional, are generally considered to be more important, while those opinions by the layperson are less valued. Opinions are one’s subjective thoughts, not necessarily based on true facts or knowledge. But, if these are given by experts in a certain field, their opinions are inevitably given more weight, because they are more likely to be evidence-based, hence true and accurate. Compared to the layperson, who may not actually know much about the subject at hand, their opinion hence becomes less valuable because these may not be true or applicable to the situation. This is also one of the most common criticisms of the democratic process; when done on a large scale involving a nation or a state, should all really be considered equally to decide the government? It is only ideal if every citizen is well-informed and capable of searching and sieving for information that is accurate or true of their country, and such is made even more uncertain with the regulation and control of the media and other information sources that may only present bias views on a certain aspect. Untrue, biased, or irrelevant opinions may detrimentally affect the final decision made, so such opinions are considered less, or phased out, and hence not everybody’s opinion is of equal value.

Furthermore, in certain situations, differing opinions are, in reality, not desired. In fact, in a decision-making process, the different or conflicting views, especially if given by a minority population, may not matter as much. This is most true if the group is large, and many people are involved. Such is known as the phenomenon “groupthink”, wherein the group, participants will strive for consensus. Such will cause those with different or opposing opinions to cast away their ideas and adopt the opinion of the rest of the group. Instead of voicing their opinions, they remain quiet to keep the peace rather than disrupt the uniformity. This psychological response automatically means differing opinions are not even considered at all (as they are not said for consideration), and loses its real value in the decision-making process, even though it may have been a crucial factor. This psychological response has a physiology aspect to it as well. From the Emory University’s neuroscientist Gregory Berns, he found that when people take a stance different from the group’s, the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection, is activated. He calls this “the pain of independence.” Hence, if individuals instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own, their opinion, realistically, loses all its value, and as such, not all opinions are of equal value.

Lastly, opinions are not of equal value, because in reality, every human is actually not equal. Society inherent discriminates against certain groups of people, causing their opinions to become repressed and unheard. On the other hand, if it comes from a person in power or status, such opinions may be given more weight. This factor sometimes even overrides the accuracy aspect of the opinion. This is especially true in rigid societal systems with the hierarchical or patriarchal organization. For instance, in a hierarchal system, the population is separated into classes by birth, and the lowest classes are inevitably discriminated against and ignored.  In India, this is prominent with the presence of the deep-rooted caste system in their society, causing the existence of the class known as Dalits (untouchables). Even though the Dalits were also human like the rest of Indian society, they had the poorest standard of life, and were heavily discriminated against; for instance, they were not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Now, with certain societal progression and bans against discrimination, many Dalits have improved quality of lives, and broken professional barriers, but many more are still trapped in repulsed jobs, such as disposing of dead animals and cleaning sewers. In 2017, around 90 sewer-cleaners, all Dalits, were fished out dead from India’s drains, an activist group reports. Such shows that Dalits’ needs, opinions are still not entirely met for and heard, due to long-standing discrimination and repression. As such, not everybody’s opinions are of equal value; depending on who it comes from, values are assigned accordingly.