I ran the numbers on my $70,000 child bonus. I was wrong.

When the government announced that every Singaporean child gets almost $70,000 from birth to 17, my first reaction was simple: I have four kids, so that’s $280,000 for my family. Hosay liao.

Then I actually sat down and did the maths properly. I was completely off the mark.

My oldest just missed the new baby gift and child credits by age cutoffs. My two middle kids get a partial run of child credits plus a PSEA top-up. Only my youngest, at 10, gets close to the full package. Add it all up across all four kids, spread over the next seven years, and my real total comes to roughly $63,000. A fraction of the $280,000.

I go through the full breakdown, kid by kid, in the video below, along with a few things I think are worth talking about:

* Why the $70K figure doesn’t hold its value

* What’s conspicuously missing from the package

* How Singapore’s incentives stack up against Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong

* Whether this was ever really a money problem to begin with

* Why I had four kids myself, and one slightly ridiculous idea for how Singapore could make big families genuinely aspirational

Doing this exercise humbled me a bit. I went in expecting to feel shortchanged by the government but I left convinced that the number was never really the point.

Would a bigger cheque actually change your mind about having kids? Or is it the other stuffs that money can’t touch?

Let me know in the comments.

Get full access to Will That Work? at www.adriantan.com.sg/subscribe