Chapter 14. Marriage and Family
14.2 Variations in Family Life
The combination of husband, wife, and children that 80% of Canadians believes constitutes a family is not representative of the majority of Canadian families. According to 2011 census data, only 31.9% of all census families consisted of a married couple with children, down from 37.4% in 2001. Sixty-three per cent of children under age 14 live in a household with two married parents. This is a decrease from almost 70% in 1981 (Statistics Canada, 2012a). As noted above, this two-parent family structure is known as a nuclear family, referring to married parents and children as the nucleus, or core, of the group. Recent years have seen a rise in variations of the nuclear family with the parents not being married. The proportion of children aged 14 and under who live with two unmarried cohabiting parents increased from 12.8% in 2001 to 16.3% in 2011 (Statistics Canada, 2012a).
Single Parents
Single-parent households are also on the rise. In 2011, 19.3% of children aged 14 and under lived with a single parent only, up slightly from 18% in 2001.
In some family structures a parent is not present at all. In 2016, 83,145 children (1.4 per cent of all children) lived with a guardian who was neither their biological nor adoptive parent. Of these children, about 4 in 10 lived with grandparents, less than 1 in 3 lived with other relatives, and 1 in 3 lived with non-relatives or foster parents (Statistics Canada, 2017). If families in which both parents and grandparents are present are included, (about 2.9 per cent of all private households), this family structure is referred to as the extended family, and may include aunts, uncles, and cousins living in the same home (Statistics Canada, 2019b). Foster children account for about 0.5 per cent of all children in private households.
In the United States, the practice of grandparents acting as parents, whether alone or in combination with the child’s parent, is becoming more common (about 9 per cent) among American families (De Toledo and Brown, 1995). A grandparent functioning as the primary care provider often results from parental drug abuse, incarceration, or abandonment. Events like these can render the parent incapable of caring for their child. However, in Canada, census evidence indicates that the percentage of children in these “skip-generation” families remained more or less unchanged between 2001 and 2016 at 0.6 per cent (Statistics Canada, 2012a; 2017).
Changes in the traditional family structure raise questions about how such societal shifts affect children. Research, mostly from American sources, has shown that children living in homes with both parents grow up with more financial and educational advantages than children who are raised in single-parent homes (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). The Canadian data is not so clear. It is true that children growing up in single-parent families experience a lower economic standard of living than famili