Top image: Benjamin Tan / RICE file photo
“One Friday every quarter, your family gets more of you!”
So goes the cheery—albeit slightly dystopian—tagline of the Eat with your Family Day (EWYFD) initiative.
Launched in 2003 by the Centre for Fathering (CFF), the initiative has gained momentum over the years, becoming a quarterly tradition held on the last Friday of each school term.
The first EWYFD this year falls this week, on March 14th. Participating companies such as Eu Yan Sang International and City Developments Ltd (CDL) (yes that CDL) will encourage employees to leave the office early at 5 PM to dine with their families.
It’s a wholesome initiative. And I’m not here to criticise it by any means.
But it’s hard to ignore the questions this initiative calls to mind: Are these ‘feel-good’ initiatives just token gestures to patch a broken system? How overworked do we have to be that quarterly family dinners are a perk our companies offer us? And can family time really be a regular priority when the demands of work make it a luxury?
The very existence of EWYFD implies that eating with one’s family isn’t already a routine thing here. Testimonials from employees on the EWYFD page aren’t exactly disproving this.
One CDL employee gushes: “I really appreciate that CDL grants us an early release of 1.5 hours every quarter on the last Friday of the school term. This allows our family to get together and have a good meal and brings us closer as a unit. It has become such a joy that my children look forward to Eat with Your Family Day and will constantly remind us when the date draws near!”
While these small gestures are cherished by many, they also highlight a deeper, famished reality. For once every quarter, we might get some semblance of a balanced life with loved ones. But what does that say about the underlying pressures that prevent family dinners from becoming a daily norm?
Eat Drink Father Mother
It’s easy to say that EWYFD should be every day. But there is only so much individuals can do to prioritise family when most companies we work for essentially have a monopoly on our time during the work week.
The average full-time employee in Singapore works about 44 hours a week (not including unpaid overtime). Which means we work longer hours than our neighbours in the Asia Pacific region.
Conversely, we rank among the bottom when it comes to the number of public holidays each year (we have a measly 11 paid public holidays, and it doesn’t seem to be increasing anytime soon).
According to a 2021 Focus on the Family survey, 70 percent of parents with children aged five to eight say that they are too busy to enjoy quality time with their kids. June Yong, the Lead of Insights at Focus on the Family Singapore, questions if work has become “an unhealthy obsession”.
“Perhaps some of us have also unwittingly subscribed to the cult of busyness, allowing it to feed into our sense of self-worth,” she muses in a CNA opinion piece.
Perhaps so. But I’d hazard a guess that most of us aren’t working ourselves to the bone because we want to.
After all, a 2023 Randstad study found that 41 percent of employees intend to leave their jobs for better work-life balance.
We clearly want more time to ourselves and our families. But this isn’t an individual issue—it’s a systemic one.
Bring Your Work to Family Day
Work-life balance is the buzzword we all love to hate. The idea of striking a perfect balance between our two worlds sounds almost like a corporate fairy tale at this point.
We’ve got plenty of companies supporting EWYFD. But are these same companies willing to go so far as to support flexible work arrangements? Or pushing for a four-day work week?
“A lot of organisations are more prepared to say they’ll fund your little mental well-being day off and all these very individual level things, but much less likely to take a look at the larger policies and process that lead to, say, ‘X’ percentage of people quitting every year,” Shiao-Yin Kuik, the executive director of Common Ground Consultancy & Civic Centre, mused at a mental health panel last September.
Just like free yoga classes don’t really do much for mental health (or make us zen-like workers), EWYFD is, essentially, a band-aid solution to a deep-rooted issue.
Too many companies are out there working their employees to the point of burnout and handing them a mental health day, or a wellness day, or a family day, as if this absolves them. As if this makes them progressive.
Outside of EWYFD, is anything else really being done by companies or the authorities to encourage more family time?
That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress in recent years. In 2024, 72.7 percent of companies in Singapore offered flexible work arrangements (FWAs), up from 68.1 percent in 2023.
But at the same time, some companies are making their employees return to the office five days a week.
And if we parse through the government’s A Singapore Made for Families 2025 plan, there are plenty of grants for parents, support programmes for caregivers, and infrastructure plans. But not many concrete steps to advance the work-life balance cause.
There are the Tripartite Guidelines on FWAs, which require employers to consider FWA requests fairly and properly. That’s great and all, but considering won’t do much to change the status quo.
Then there’s the suggestion to get employers to jump on the My Family Weekend bandwagon. The plan includes things like letting staff leave work at 5 PM for EWYFD, hosting ‘Bring Your Family to Work’ days, or throwing a company Family Day.
All good in theory, but as we’ve already established, these don’t exactly solve the real issue: the average Singaporean worker’s work-life balance is still hanging by a thread.
Family Day, Every Day
What is the solution, then? If any employers happen to be reading this, I’ll spell it out for you: Move beyond seeing employees as resources that you have to squeeze to obtain maximum profits.
The odd couple hours off every quarter isn’t enough to show that you care. Instead, give your employees enough time off work that they can actually have a life. And for the love of god, don’t text them and expect an immediate response when they’re off work.
The occasional Family Day or EWYFD is well-intentioned, but we’re going nowhere until there’s a cultural shift toward meaningful work-life integration.
Until we begin to see employees as more than just resources to be maximised, the illusion of ‘family time’ will remain just that: an occasional, fleeting privilege that only some can afford.
Because let’s be honest: we all want more than just a couple of free hours to eat dinner at home. We want to feast on a fulfilling life, not just nibble at it once every few months.
