BY: Lee Siew Hua, Senior Political Correspondent

EVEN as Singapore tries mightily once more to boost the birth rate, our absent babies tell a fascinating story about us as a nation.

It was demographer Paul Cheung who made me think, when he said in a July interview that Singaporeans have a 'mental map' of what the ideal family is and they take the path of least resistance to parenthood.

'That means you must have a house or a maid. Then, when everything is settled, you have a kid,' said Singapore's former chief statistician from 1990 to 2004.

He contrasted the situation here with that in New York, where he now works and has observed career women struggling with prams and parental duties.

These women are determined to have it all and enjoy the process as well.

Like him, I made the mental leap to the United States, where I'd encountered such single-minded women in my years there.

When I think of American families, I think not so much of broken homes but more of the high-powered professionals who work fast and confidently, then leave on time to play with their children.

I remember the many adult sons and daughters - one of them an active engineer in his mid-60s - who dutifully drive four or five hours to visit their elderly parents a couple of states away.

Family is a bedrock institution, and this expresses itself in America's values, culture, lifestyle and enviable fertility rate.

Family is certainly important in Singapore too. But Singaporean couples may be looking for perfect parenting conditions, unknowingly, before having babies.

We have a perfectionist spirit, after all, and so much of our vital energy is poured into Number One rankings.

That's the kinder interpretation, among a complex of possible reasons of why we have few babies.

I also think there's a certain element of 'learned helplessness' at play.

One reader called me to argue animatedly that now that the Government wants more children, it should also offer a financial cushion should parents lose their jobs.

There's no longer an iron rice bowl, said this man, who works in sales. He wants a third child, but worries about retrenchment.

The Government, he continued, should go through the Central Provident Fund data to pinpoint the couples who may need help with kids. Give them $20,000 right away instead of baby bonuses and other complicated perks, he said.

I sympathise with him on some counts, and know people do have valid money worries in these inflationary days. But intrusive searches of our data? And depending so automatically on state help when we're not low-income?

Ask anyone, and you'll hear more examples of helplessness and its twin, a tendency to complain out of frustration.

A friend who was talking about Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's conservation drive and his war on plastic bags heard an interesting rejoinder.

The Government, someone replied, should provide alternatives. Otherwise, how else would people dispose of their garbage?

The psychologist Martin Seligman gave the world the term 'learned helplessness'.

His experiments indicated that animals that perceive themselves in a situation of unavoidable discomfort will finally just learn to accept the situation unconditionally.

Human beings do that too. We learn to act helpless, even if we have the power to change circumstances.

At the Lions Home for the Elders in Toa Payoh Rise, a clinical administration manager once explained that residents can develop learned helplessness after a long time in a nursing home, where everything is done by the staff.

'Once that happens, they become passive recipients, and there's no motivation for them to do anything,' she said.

So those who are still relatively mobile are made to feel independent. They get the freedom to follow their own routines. They do not have to wake up, eat, and bathe at fixed times.

And they make their own beds and sweep their floors, just as they would in their own homes.

I imagine the older people find life more liberating and purposeful this way, when they do not depend on others excessively.

We like to think that we are a nanny state. But the flipside is, are we infantilising ourselves?

I believe that with the new parenthood perks, the Government is not trying to be a nanny. It has always stuck to a self-reliance ethos.

'Singaporeans need to become more self-reliant in their financial affairs,' Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said.

That quote is posted on the website of MoneySENSE, a financial education effort run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

When a panel of Cabinet ministers presented the enhanced Marriage and Parenthood package earlier this week, it was clear that the Government was keen to give couples a helping hand. But it also knew that having babies is a deeply personal choice.

Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan indicated that it was not a question of 'buying' babies. But the Government is now offering choices and options for citizens who wish to marry and have babies.

And that's the message: We're getting choices, and some financial incentives to smoothen the big life decisions.

The fact that the country's long-term baby dearth is a strategic problem has moved policymakers to step into the bedroom, and prompted the Prime Minister to tell the nation about dating and diaper-changing. I didn't quite expect that, but it dramatises the seriousness of the baby issue.

These few days, the littlest members of our population have cast our nation in a very interesting light.

It has revealed our attitudes of perfectionism along with a certain helplessness.

How this era contrasts with that of our immigrant grandparents, when they simply dug in their heels and worked their hearts out, even when they were really more helpless and vulnerable than this generation.

And just 20 or 30 years ago, young scholars were sent off to study engineering.

They came home to doggedly and creatively crack problems so the young nation could spring up around them. Problem-solvers and doers like them are generally not helpless, carping types. They just get things done.

Today, we have exceedingly more, yet also less.

Hopefully, as today's babies grow up, the era will change again.

My hope rises as I hear about my friends' children. They seem to have passion. Some want to be activists and doers when they grow up.

I'm sure the babies ahead will do us proud.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on August 23, 2008.