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Canada's Changing Family Picture
from: Karlie BestlerCanada's latest family statistics show that the traditional family of a mother and father heading up the household is declining. Common-law couples, single parents and same-sex couples are increasingly heading more families according to a Statistics Canada report released in September, 2007.
Two decades ago, married couples made up 80% of families. In 2006, that number had dropped to 68.6%. Single parents and common-law couples heading families has increased significantly. Twenty years ago, common-law couples made up 7.2% of families and single parents headed 12.7% of families. Today, common-law partners make up 15.5% and single parents make up 15.9%.
It is much more acceptable to live together before getting married than it use to be. In a lot of cases, people just don't get married because there really isn't any cultural pressure on them to do so.
Single parent families in Canada are also changing. The number of men heading families increased at twice the rate (14.6%) of women (6.3%). Women still remain the dominant single parent at about 80% compared to only 20% of men, mainly because women are more likely to get custody of the children.
Same-sex married partners made the most gains, 32.6% increase between 2001 and 2006. That was five times the pace of traditional opposite-sex married couples representing 0.6% of all couples in Canada in 2006. This was the first time the census counted same-sex married couples in the survey. Canada legalized same-sex marriage across the country in 2005. Half of all same-sex couples live in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with Toronto having the largest same-sex couple families.
A trend that has been steadily growing for the past five years is that children stay at their parents home, or return to it, for longer periods of time. In 2001, 41.1% of young adults lived with their parents. This increased to 43.5% in 2006. The trend could be due to a number of issues, such as staying in school longer, waiting longer to form a relationship, or financial difficulties.
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