Dragon Year Baby Myth of Singapore


I dislike old wives tales and hate people who help spread them without stopping to think for a second. Most of these sayings, beliefs and sayings come from China and passed down via our ancestors who migrated to South-East Asia.

Decades passed, from bronze age to internet age but silly myths have continue to be considered as gospel truths. I'm not saying that someone in the past lied. I'm implying they have evolved to be lies over the years after no longer being facts.

In this post we'll just discuss about one of them, I'm sure you have heard of this:


Dragon Year is a bad time to have babies because you will have a hard time enrolling your kid in school because of the spike in birth-rate in that year.

This is bullshit and it annoys me quite a bit to hear them repeated mindlessly by people of different generations. It's about hell time this is to be debunked.

Singaporeans are all educated folks who can read graphs. Here's one: (Click to expand)


The previous Dragon Year was 2000. That year birthrate dropped from 13.38 births/1000 population to 12.79/1000. Where is the spike in births? Are there phantom babies queuing up enrolling in schools? The number of schools, if I may assume, should be have increased instead of decreased over the years. How could there be a higher difficulty in enrolling children? 

The right question should be : Which school?

Then look at our glorious performance over the decade. By 2011 our birthrate has dropped to 8.5/1000, a whopping 33.5% decrease since the last Dragon Year.  

To equal the previous Dragon Year birthrate, Singaporeans have to increase their birthrate by 4.29/1000 from the 2011 birthrate. That's a 150% increase. Do you seriously think that could possibly happen?

That's a tall order if you ask me. If we could even muster a 1% increase, PM Lee Hsien Loong will shed tears of joy after failing to increase our birthrate every single year since he took over as Prime Minister and a strong reason to restore ministerial pay "back to normal".

Are you convinced? Spread the word if you are and how about having a Dragon Baby then?

This crap should be done by MYCS. I'm doing this for them FREE and it just took me an hour.

14 comments:

  1. have baby ar.....no house no $$ how hahahaha....

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    Replies
    1. Why need house to have baby? You live under the expressway bridge now meh?

      Money I can't help la. i also cannot handle myself now :S

      Delete
  2. People are probably still recovering from 1988 =)

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    1. ahh... that's a good one. and SARS in 2003, another one in 2001 and then that 2008, it's never going to be recovered yeah

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  3. i cant have baby now...i just switch a job haha

    ah pooh

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    Replies
    1. i can't think of a single reason about having a baby but i can think of 1000 why not to.

      Delete
  4. Interesting post. Perhaps it's due to the reports that China's birth rate spikes (will spike?) in Dragon Years, so it is assumed true in Singapore as well. But was it 13.38 in 1999? Didn't see in graph. Even if it were, it's just one incident; too hasty to claim that birth rate always drops in Dragon Year.

    Or perhaps Group A thinks it's auspicious and tries for babies in Dragon Year (rate up) and Group B thinks it's impratical for enrolling purposes and avoids Dragon babies (rate down). Therefore dragon year becomes like any other year.

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    1. Hasty? The birthrate has been dropping every single year for since dunno when...

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  5. It would spike all right -because of the new citizens.
    They are the target audience for lots of govt things, by the way.

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    1. new citizens will soon face the same constraints singaporeans have been facing. it might work for a while but soon it'll be business as usual.

      they're not addressing the root problems. it'll just creep back.

      Delete
  6. Hi, not sure where you got your data from, but a Today news report in 2006 did in fact report an increase in total births from 1999 to 2000.

    http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=today20070713-1.2.3&sessionid=85095f03bfd74a6cbd4e6fd158a2372b&keyword=year+of+the+dragon+trend+babies&search=advanced&fromdate=&todate=&articles=1&advertisements=0&illustrations=0&letters=1&obituaries=0&miscellaneous=0&newspaperTitles=today&fuzzysearch=Off&token=the%2cof%2cyear%2cdragon%2ctrend%2cbabies

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    Replies
    1. CIA - The World Factbook. I trust that more over some 150tish ranked media

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  7. i dun mind having one but canot leh...
    december den customary.... now canot have.. =P

    OT: wow! ah pooh change job liao~~~

    -Julia

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    Replies
    1. wat customary, u are LEGALLY MARRIED. wat century liao, aiyoh!

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