Legally Obliging Filial Piety
Alice Chen Yan examines a legally peculiar and globally unique Singaporean law that empowers parents to sue their adult children for cash and care.
In a state where it is a crime to sell chewing gum, feed birds in the park, and not flush a public toilet, I was still surprised to discover, during my first class at Singapore’s National Law School, the extent of the state’s intrusion into the family home. Under Singapore’s Maintenance of Parents Act, parents may sue their grown-up children for a monthly allowance. Since the Act’s implementation in 1999, more than 400 applications have been made, and – in a clear indication of the court’s attitude – four in five applicants have successfully obtained an order compelling their children to support them.
This globally unique legal development was well received by Singaporeans following its enactment and this continues to be the case. There is now discussion of its importation into China, and possibly other Asian countries. However, both its legal foundation and moral justification are dubious.
Imposing a legal obligation on children to care for their parents is a legal oddity. It may be instinctive to liken it to investment law. Parents, in raising children, are making a smart investment in a life-term asset, which, upon maturity, will yield regular returns. But raising a child, like any investment, is not risk-free, and if you make a poor investment decision and end up with an ungrateful child, you may lose the entire amount you invested.
Alternatively, there may be an analogy to contract or debt law. A child, upon birth, enters into a contract with his or her parents, or takes on a debt. The parent provides care and financial support for the child until adulthood, and, in return, the child provides the same to the parent in old age. However, the crucial element of voluntariness is missing; a child has no say as to whether or not he or she is born.
Love cannot be a legal obligation, and genuine concern cannot be commanded by a court order.
One attempt to evade the common requirement of volition in legal relationships – in the case of Singaporean parents and their children – has been to liken this peculiar relationship to the special relationship between the individual and the state. The state provides essential public goods and services to its citizens, over which (for practical purposes) the citizens have no choice, and in return citizens pay taxes to the state. However, this analogy fails to account for the fact that in any democratic state, citizens can choose their governments through the election process, collectively remove them from power, and even relocate abroad. Children, if unhappy with their parentage, do not have similar powers to ‘choose’ their parents. One may argue that Singapore’s one-party political system has done away with democracy, anyway. But the parallel of the state-individual relationship runs into a further obstacle. Parents have a direct, personal and universally recognised fiduciary obligation to care for their children. The state’s obligations to its citizens are far less clear. In essence, the Singaporean state is imposing a debt on a person to provide care against his or her will, following the provision of care by his or her parents, who had a fiduciary duty to do so, anyway.
Legally, it does not make sense. But the locals argue that it is, nevertheless, a good law because it is ‘culturally sensible’. The Act upholds people’s common concern for filial piety and sends a clear message to ungrateful children, warning them of their just desserts should they violate this traditional principle. It appeals to traditional Asian values, which Singapore is determined to maintain, as evident in Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s 2009 National Day Speech: “We Asians pay great attention to filial piety. This is a traditional virtue and we must maintain this.” It embodies a particular Singaporean phenomenon, where whenever a person runs out of explanations for a particular policy – whether it is a proposed bill or a canteen rule – they will scratch their heads and simply say: “You don’t get it, it’s Asian values lah.”
This impenetrable cultural divide between the Asian and Western worlds is often a convincing and sometimes tenable explanation in such cases. I noted the extent of this cultural chasm when Singaporean students in my class supported the Act unanimously, despite being the bearers of the Act’s burden in the future. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. It is common practice for children in Singapore, and for the most part in Asia as a whole, to expect full tuition funding and a lofty living allowance until they start working. Almost all live rent-free with their parents until they marry and many will not move out until they have children of their own. It was unthinkable to my classmates that I, not unlike many young Australians, moved out of home upon turning 18, with my parents cutting off all financial ties from that point.
Perhaps the Act is valid if it formalises long-standing and widely accepted social and cultural norms. Yet whilst my ignorance of ‘Asian values’ was at first a persuasive reason to avoid further engagement with the issue, after a month of hearing this rebuttal, I began to suspect that it was merely a convenient strategy to protect poor policy from criticism, under the mask of cultural sensitivity. When one dares to probe further, it becomes evident that the Act does not serve, and perhaps may even circumvent, its professed aims.
The Act merely upholds filial piety in a binding form. But the value of filial piety is one of substance; love cannot be a legal obligation, and genuine concern cannot be commanded by a court order. Court action between a parent and a child evidences a breakdown in their relationship, and in all likelihood intensifies existing animosity. The Act is a blunt instrument that makes an assessment of a maintenance payment based on the child’s average income, his or her circumstances, the parent’s monthly needs, and the parent-child relationship. Disobedience of a payment order is penalised by up to $5,000, or up to six months in gaol.
Whilst … the majority of Singaporeans support the sacred value of filial piety, they need to be wary of the state appealing to these sentiments as a convenient guise for ulterior motives.
If the Act were actually geared to maintaining and improving child-parent relationships, as it purports, surely it should utilise mediation and conciliation procedures. Furthermore, the Act should identify and seek to address the underlying problems that cause some children to ‘abandon’ their parents in later life. The present generation of young adults, sandwiched between feeding their own children and supporting their parents, may simply be unable to make sufficient payments to their parents. On the other hand, if children can afford to take care of their parents but choose not to, this suggests a shift from the values that the Act claims to represent.
A cynical observer will argue that the Singaporean Government is trying to pass the buck of elderly care to those who can be culturally pressured into accepting it. With the cost of healthcare, property and general living in Singapore escalating, it is a convenient political tactic to scapegoat responsibility for providing for the elderly. If this is to be believed, it will come as no surprise that the Singaporean Government has recently proposed an expansion of the Act to allow third parties, including nursing homes, to take action against children on behalf of their patients. Nor is it surprising that other countries in the region, which also have large elderly populations, have taken a growing interest in Singapore’s policy.
Whilst it remains clear that the majority of Singaporeans support the sacred value of filial piety, they need to be wary of the state appealing to these sentiments as a convenient guise for ulterior motives.
