Returning to work after childbirth is one of the most vulnerable periods in a parent’s personal and professional life. While Southeast Asia has made significant strides in parental leave policies and flexible work arrangements, many working parents still face a major gap: the lack of accessible, everyday support during early caregiving.
As a mother of four and an entrepreneur, I’ve experienced this tension firsthand. The physical recovery, emotional demands, and chronic sleep deprivation don’t end when maternity or paternity leave does. Yet many of us are expected to return to our jobs and perform as if nothing has changed.
This “mental load”, the invisible labour of remembering feeding schedules, monitoring baby cues, managing lactation concerns, and coordinating care, often falls on parents, particularly mothers. It’s rarely acknowledged in workplace policy but deeply affects wellbeing, productivity, and retention.
How Technology Can Help
Human support, through partners, family, and colleagues, remains vital. But technology can play an important supporting role in making the daily demands of caregiving more manageable. The tech wasn’t meant for replacing healthcare professionals; it’s about offering immediate, evidence-based reassurance, especially during late-night feeds or early morning doubts, times when formal help is harder to reach. It’s a small, tech-enabled way to ease cognitive load, helping parents regain time and mental clarity to be present at home and at work.
Integration, Not Balance
The traditional notion of “work-life balance” implies clean boundaries between work and caregiving. But for many Southeast Asian households, especially those without extended support, this is neither practical nor realistic. Parenting and working often overlap, particularly in hybrid or remote work environments.
What modern parents need is not balance, but integration: the ability to transition fluidly between roles without constant disruption, guilt, or burnout. For employers, this means recognising caregiving not as a private issue but a shared, structural reality.
Parental Leave in Singapore
Supporting working parents goes beyond offering generous leave or flexible schedules. For HR leaders and business decision-makers, it’s about creating systems, digital tools, inclusive practices, and communication norms that acknowledge the invisible work parents often carry alongside their professional responsibilities.
Singapore’s evolving parental leave policies offer a useful lens. When I gave birth in 2014, 2015, and 2017, my husband, then serving his National Service with the Air Force, was eligible for only one or two weeks of leave. It was a modest but vital time, and we made the most of it.
Today, eligible working fathers in Singapore can access up to four weeks of Shared Parental Leave (SPL), drawn from the mother’s Government-Paid Maternity Leave. This policy applies when the child is a Singapore citizen and the parent has worked for at least three months before birth. Fathers must also be legally married to the child’s mother at the time of birth or within a year of it.
This shift reflects a growing recognition of the father’s role in early caregiving and presents an opportunity for employers to cultivate more equitable, family-friendly cultures. When organisations normalise caregiving, not just through compliance but through culture and infrastructure, they build workplaces where parents are more likely to stay, contribute meaningfully, and thrive.
Building for Parents Like Us
Ultimately, I built MyBBuddy for working parents like my partner and me, those who want to be present and connected with their children without sacrificing professional aspirations. The app doesn’t claim to solve parenting. But it offers practical, timely support that helps lighten the mental load, promote recovery, and support confident re-entry into the workplace.
The app includes a contraction timer, baby tracker, and a lactation troubleshooting tool. These may seem like basic features, but when you’re exhausted and anxious, eliminating the need to Google symptoms or record data manually can make a meaningful difference. MyBBuddy also allows care teams, partners, family members, or professionals to view structured inputs, improving communication and continuity of care.
As Southeast Asia reimagines the future of work, we must remember that families are part of that future. If we want more women in leadership, healthier employees, and resilient workforces, supporting parents, especially in the critical early months, must become a long-term strategy, not a side policy.
The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to design better systems that help us do both, with more care, confidence, and compassion.
About the author
Rynette Joyce Tan is the Founder of 13Thirteen, a Singapore-based company offering babywearing, breastfeeding, and early parenting support to empower new parents. She also co-founded MyBBuddy, a digital platform providing accessible tools for families during early childhood, and has led content and marketing initiatives through Mint Perspectives. Backed by degrees in Psychology and Marketing and multiple parenting-related certifications, Rynette combines academic expertise with her experience as a mother of four to champion attachment-based parenting.
