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Speech by Mr Eric Chua, Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Social and Family Development and Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth at Singapore Family Therapy Conference

Type: Official Speeches (All), Official Speeches: Eric Chua,

Topic(s): Social Service Agencies & Partners, Social Service Professionals,


Mr. Frederick Tsao, Chairman of Tsao Pao Chee and Founder of Octave Institute

 

Mr Ng Pak Shun, Chairman of Counselling and Care Centre

 

A/P Allan Chia, Deputy Provost of Singapore University of Social Sciences,

 

Ladies and gentlemen

 

Introduction

 

  1. A very good morning to all of you. It is indeed very wonderful to be here speaking to all of you.

     

  2. Today, we are joined by practitioners from diverse fields, including social services and healthcare, but we have one mission – we are united in our efforts to uplift, support and empower families in Singapore.

     

  3. I would like to first thank the Counselling and Care Centre, the Singapore University of Social Sciences, and Octave Institute for organising this conference on systemic family practice. This is an important topic because families are the bedrock of our society.

     

  4. As the first line of care and support, our families play a crucial role in shaping our identity, values, and growth. They are where we find comfort in times of difficulties, where we learn to navigate the complexities of life and where we learn to be resilient individuals. When families are strong, individuals flourish, and our society as a whole thrives. That is why we are committed at MSF to build a Singapore Made for Families.

     

    Family-Centricity as the Core Principle of Our Society

     

  5. Ensuring that Singapore is a place where families can thrive at every stage of life, even when facing challenges, is a necessity. To do this, we must consider the family unit in all that we do.

     

  6. As social service practitioners, this family-centred approach takes on a particular significance. Now this involves recognising the challenges that are faced by our clients. These challenges rarely exist in isolation and they often stem from or affect family dynamics. So therefore, our interventions must therefore consider the broader family context, not just the single person, not just the individual.

     

  7. Functional Family Therapy or FFT, implemented by MSF’s Clinical and Forensic Psychology Service since 2014, adopts this approach to tackle emotional and behavioural issues in children and youths who come from families known to the juvenile justice or child welfare systems. Systemic family therapy addresses not just an individual but also family dynamics including conflict-ridden family relationships, intergenerational trauma, and mental health issues. Through FFT, families are empowered to collaborate in overcoming challenges.

     

  8. But in this piece of work – I would say that in many other pieces of work that we are at, in terms of our nation building phase – the Government cannot go at it alone.

     

    Importance of Whole-of-Society Support and Systemic Approach

  9. For our families to thrive, we must first work with the community. Just as how the challenges faced by our clients has nexus with family dynamics, we must recognise that the family as a unit does not exist in a vacuum; it exists within the context of the community. Therefore, it requires the support of our community.

     

    10. A systemic approach helps us better understand and address a family’s needs and concerns. Issues rarely exist in isolation and this approach recognises the family as part of an interconnected system. It is then important to target underlying dynamics and look beyond surface-level issues. 

     

    11. One such example is the Strengthening Families Programme@Family Service Centre (FAM@FSC), which many of you would be familiar with. This programme provides family counselling for families undergoing stress in their relationships with their loved ones. This could be a marriage in difficulty, a father who is looking for counselling help to improve his relationship with his children or couples on the verge of or undergoing divorce. The current 10 FAM@FSCs work closely with other service providers in the community, such as Social Service Offices (SSOs) and FSC partners, to ensure seamless service delivery, tighter referral processes and more holistic assistance to families, especially those with multiple and complex needs.

     

    12. The effectiveness of the systemic family therapy is displayed through its strength-based, intensive and structured approach, and how it promotes sustainable change in the long run. By leveraging an evidence-based systemic approach, we can effectively address a wide range of issues, including behavioural challenges, emotional struggles, and intergenerational trauma.

     

    Evidence-based interventions

     

    13. To ensure our interventions are effective, we need to ensure they are continually evaluated and improved upon. By incorporating evaluation and adopting evidence-based interventions into our work, we create a feedback loop that informs decision-making, drives innovation, and leads to better outcomes for those that we serve.

     

    14. This feedback loop is crucial in delivering research-informed practice, which increases the credibility of the field of family therapy to be more effective and deliver positive outcomes. However, not all interventions display consistent positive outcomes. Therefore, we must be stringent in our selection of interventions and conduct our own evaluation to ensure its effectiveness in the local context.

     

    15. I recently came across an inspiring example of the positive impact of FFT on youth offenders. On top of the research evidence in the non-Asian countries, a local randomised controlled trial by MSF demonstrated that youth offenders in Singapore who underwent FFT exhibited significantly improved well-being outcomes. In fact, they were about four times more likely to successfully complete their probation orders compared to those who did not receive this intervention.

     

    16. Thus, I encourage practitioners to embark on evaluation so that together we can bring about positive outcomes for families in Singapore.

     

    Conclusion

    17. I want to share some of my thoughts about the stressors that families in Singapore are facing, and also the stressors that you know many of you as social service practitioners on the are facing. The different units of the family today are under stress. First of all, I talk about our youth. We often hear the very presumptuous kind of conclusion that youths today are quite the “strawberry”. They are worldly, wise, but they are soft. Bump them a little, and they get bruised easily. I always speak up in response to that to say, well, if you claim that, why is that? Actually, I think the fact is that the world that we live in today is a very different world from at least the world I lived in as a youth in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. When I was a youth, I didn’t have to worry about curating a nice social media profile. I didn’t have to worry about bullying, both in real life and in the cyberspace. And this thing about unrealistic body image, I think, has been carried to the extremes in the past few decades. To be sure, these are not new problems. There are also the stressors that comes with the use of devices being hyper connected, and I’m not even going into addiction issues that exist in our society.

     

    18. On the part of parents, men and women, there are challenges that we have not talked about. How do we define what masculinity is in modern day Singapore, the tension between traditional concepts of masculinity vis-à-vis what the more progressive among us might feel that definition to be.  But it’s not so much the presence of this tension that is a point of stress – it is the fact that we don’t really talk about it. That then becomes a point of stress as an Asian, as a more conservative society. I think there are many issues like this that we don’t talk about, including the issue of mental health, which is a really relevant and important issue for all of us. As you can see in the latest study, it’s one in three. I think that is a staggering statistic by any standard. So by that measure, by any measure, I think the number of stressors that our family units face, we are being pulled in all different directions. Not to mention also the role of mothers, the role of women in Singapore is evolving, changing, and the traditional expectations of caregiving that falls upon the women in the family vis-à-vis more progressive roles. For that matter, can husbands, fathers be the main caregivers? What about the role of house husbands?

     

  10.  In our society, I think we need a lot more conversations, and many of you as practitioners on the ground will face these issues and look them in the eye. As social service practitioners, I would also want to address something close to your heart, because I know many of you face mounting caseloads. That is something that is on the minds of everyone in the Ministry. We are well aware of that, and well aware that each case that you see today is not quite the same as perhaps the cases in the past, because today’s cases are complex. The challenges are indeed interlocking, and we do have many more issues to deal with per case. You might have also heard about the review that’s ongoing now in the family services space. There’s a review that’s going on to make sure that we can better organise ourselves such that we can delivery more family centric services, keep up to date in terms of how we organise ourselves within the sector, but in terms of the end outcome, there is only one – and that is to make sure that the families in Singapore are well supported and are able to receive adequate and prompt interventions as they should.

     

    20. And in the next few months, as we undertake this review, my promise to you, colleagues on the ground, is that I will visit as many centres, I will try to meet as many of you as possible as we undertake this review, because we want your voices to be heard as well. We want your input for this exercise, and this will not, and should not be a paper exercise where we sit in a room, get together in a committee, and then we get things done. I don’t think that is supposed to be the way, and that’s not how collaborative teamwork is all about. And I think we do want collaborative teamwork to be the mainstay of this sector moving forward.

     

    21. My personal experiences working with rough sleepers, ComLink+ families and youths-at-risk have showed me in the past four years that we must foster strong family bonds within each unit’s context. In fact, these bonds are an important factor for successful rehabilitation and even reintegration. Although each family would have had their own unique set of challenges, what I saw in common was the need for familial support.

     

    22. And your collective efforts have been and will be instrumental in enabling families in Singapore to thrive.

     

    23. So let us continue our efforts to support our families so that we can have a stronger and more resilient Singapore.

     

    24. Thank you very much and I wish everybody a great day ahead.