I have been on both sides of the tuition table.

As a student, I went for tuition. Later, I also tutored part-time. I have seen why extra academic help can be useful, especially when a child needs a concept explained differently or simply needs more individual attention than a teacher can realistically provide in class.

So I am not anti-tuition. Nor do I think sports, music lessons, enrichment classes or other structured activities are inherently a problem.

The question is what happens when we keep adding them.

One class becomes three. A weekday afternoon might include school, student care, Chinese tuition and homework. Saturday could mean swimming in the morning, piano after lunch and another academic class before dinner. Each activity can be justified on its own. Together, however, they may leave a child with very little time that does not belong to an adult’s plan.

In Singapore, the pressure to provide more is not imaginary. According to the Singapore Department of Statistics, married couple-based households whose youngest child was aged seven to 15 spent an average of S$548 a month on private tuition in 2023. That figure is averaged across all households in the group, including those that did not spend on tuition.

But spending tells us only that tuition has become a significant part of family life. It does not tell us whether every child needs it.

Why tuition can help when school is not enough

It is tempting to ask why some children appear to learn better from a tutor than they do in school. But that framing is unfair to teachers.

A tutor and a classroom teacher are working under very different conditions.

Ministry of Education data shows that the average form class size in 2024 was 33.8 students at primary level and 32.9 at secondary level. Actual class sizes can be smaller for some subjects and support programmes, but even a very good teacher cannot spend an entire lesson investigating why one student has misunderstood or does not understand one concept.

Gary Ong, founder of Genius Mind Home Tuition, says the main advantage of one-to-one tuition is not that the tutor somehow replaces the teacher, but that the tutor has more time to focus on one child’s specific difficulties.

A tutor can stop when a student is confused, work backwards to identify where the misunderstanding began and try another way of explaining the same concept. Some children may also feel more comfortable admitting that they do not understand something to one person than raising their hand in front of a class.

“Tuition should complement school, not duplicate it,” Ong says.

That distinction matters. Two additional hours of worksheets may simply give a child two more hours of work. Two hours spent addressing a specific learning gap may serve a clearer purpose.

How can parents tell whether tuition is actually helping?

Better grades are an obvious measure, but they are not the only one — and sometimes they can hide whether a child has genuinely understood the material.

Ong suggests looking beyond how many worksheets have been completed. Signs that tuition may be improving understanding include whether the child can:

explain a concept in their own words;
apply what they have learnt when a question is phrased differently;
complete homework more independently;
make fewer repeated mistakes;
recognise why an answer is wrong rather than waiting for someone to correct it; and
ask increasingly specific questions about what they do not understand.

In other words, useful tuition should gradually make the child more capable without the tutor, rather than more dependent on one.

When tuition is not the answer

The more interesting part of my conversation with Ong came when I asked whether there are times when he tells parents that tuition may not be necessary.

His answer was yes.

If a child is coping academically, understands what is being taught and can study independently, he says adding tuition simply because other children have it may provide little benefit.

More importantly, poor performance is not always an academic problem.

A child may be exhausted. They may be sleeping too little. Their schedule may already be overloaded. They may have lost motivation or simply have no downtime. In those cases, another tuition session could make the underlying problem worse rather than solve it.

One disappointing examination result also does not automatically establish a long-term need for tuition. Before adding another class, parents need to understand what went wrong.

The problem may not be any one activity

This is where the conversation becomes bigger than tuition.

A weekly sports class is not excessive. Neither is piano. Neither is tuition. An enrichment programme that a child loves could be one of the best parts of their week.

But a child’s body does not experience these commitments as separate entries on a parent’s calendar. It experiences the total load.

That matters when a child suddenly says, “I don’t want to go anymore.”

As we explored in Should You Let Your Child Quit a Sport?, wanting to stop an activity can mean many things. The child might dislike the coach, feel discouraged or have genuinely lost interest. But they could also simply be tired because schoolwork and other commitments have made the family schedule too demanding.

Before deciding that a child lacks perseverance, it is worth asking whether the activity itself is the problem or whether there are simply too many activities competing for the same limited energy.

Sleep is part of the timetable too

When schedules become crowded, sleep is often treated as the flexible part.

Yet Singapore’s Grow Well SG guidance states that children aged seven and above should generally aim for nine to 11 hours of sleep. It also reports that 65% of school-age children in Singapore are not getting the recommended amount.

A child who is too tired to concentrate in class may then appear to need more academic support. More tuition is added. Bedtime becomes later. The child becomes even more tired.

That does not mean insufficient sleep explains every academic difficulty. It does mean parents should look at the whole system before assuming the solution is another lesson.

Signs that the overall schedule may be too full

There is no universal maximum number of activities that applies to every child. Age, temperament, school demands, travel time and the intensity of each commitment all matter.

Instead of counting classes, look at what the schedule is doing to the child.

Ong suggests paying attention when children are consistently exhausted, sleeping too little, unusually irritable, struggling to concentrate or losing interest in activities they previously enjoyed. Another warning sign is diminishing returns: the child is spending more time in lessons but absorbing less because they are tired.

Parents can also ask:

Does my child still have regular periods with nothing scheduled?
Are meals, sleep or family time repeatedly being squeezed around activities?
Does my child look forward to at least some of these commitments?
Are we adding classes because of a clear need, or because everyone else seems to be doing them?
If we removed one activity, would something important be lost or would the family mostly feel anxious about “falling behind”?

The last question may be the hardest one.

Are we helping our children, or managing our own anxiety?

It is easy to reduce Singapore’s tuition and enrichment culture to parents being kiasu. There is truth in the fear of losing out, but the psychology is more complicated than parents simply wanting their child to beat everyone else’s.

A parent may notice their child struggling with Maths. Another parent recommends a tutor. Classmates appear to be attending enrichment programmes. School assessments become harder. Social media serves up another list of things children supposedly need to learn before a certain age.

Eventually, “Would this help my child?” can quietly become “Can I afford not to give my child this?”

That anxiety is understandable. Parents make decisions now without knowing which opportunities will matter years later. Saying no can feel as though we are closing a door on our child’s future.

But more opportunities do not automatically create a better childhood.

Five questions to ask before adding another class

1. What problem are we trying to solve?

Be specific. “I want her to do better” is different from “She does not understand fractions and has been struggling with them for two months.” A specific problem makes it easier to decide whether tuition, speaking to the teacher, changing study habits or simply giving the child more time is the appropriate response.

2. Is the activity doing what we hoped it would?

Review existing commitments instead of allowing them to renew automatically. Is the child learning, enjoying themselves or gaining confidence? If the purpose is no longer clear, continuing because “we’ve always done it” is not a strong reason.

3. What is this activity replacing?

An hour-long class rarely costs only an hour. There may be travel, changing clothes, meals pushed later and homework completed afterwards. Look at the true amount of time the activity occupies.

That is particularly important when choosing sports programmes. Our guide on preparing children for their first sports class discusses how the environment, routine and expectations around a lesson can affect a child’s experience, not just the activity itself.

4. Does my child have any meaningful say?

Children do not need complete control over every family decision. Parents will sometimes require them to attend school, practise something difficult or honour a reasonable commitment.

But children should still have room to express that they are tired, unhappy or no longer interested without every objection being interpreted as laziness.

5. What are we afraid will happen if we say no?

This may reveal whether the additional activity is addressing the child’s need or the parent’s fear.

If the main answer is “Everyone else is doing it”, “What if they fall behind?” or “I don’t want to regret not giving them the opportunity”, it may be worth sitting with that discomfort before reaching for the registration form.

A full schedule is not the same as a rich childhood

Unstructured time can look unproductive from an adult perspective because there is no obvious outcome to measure.

But children also need time when nobody is teaching, coaching, correcting or assessing them.

Sometimes they will use that time creatively. Sometimes they will read, play or talk. Sometimes, as we argued in our guide to keeping children occupied during the school holidays, they may simply be bored for a while — and parents do not always need to solve that immediately.

Ong puts the academic version of this question simply: instead of asking how many hours a child is studying, ask how much they are actually absorbing from those hours.

The same principle can apply to the rest of childhood.

How many activities can we fit into the week is not necessarily the most useful measure. A better question is what those activities are adding to the child’s life — and what the child is giving up in return.

Sometimes helping means finding the tutor who can finally explain something in a way that clicks. Sometimes it means encouraging a child through the difficult first weeks of a sport. Sometimes it means giving them an opportunity they would never have discovered by themselves.

And sometimes helping means removing one thing from the calendar.

References

Singapore Department of Statistics, What Did Married Couple-Based Households with Young Children Spend On?, Household Expenditure Survey 2023.
Ministry of Education Singapore, Education Statistics Digest 2025, class size data for 2024.
Health Promotion Board / Grow Well SG, Better Sleep.
Interview responses from Gary Ong, founder of Genius Mind Home Tuition, provided to The Wellness Insider.

Images: Envato