News, Tidbits and Updates
According to Statistics Canada, over the last 100 years, Canada has experienced many social, economic, legislative, and cultural changes. As a result, the family circumstances and living arrangements of Canadians have evolved substantially.
- In 1931, 12% of children were in lone-parent families, close to the proportion experienced in 1981 (13%). Most of these children lived with a widowed lone parent, meaning that a relatively large share of children at this time had experienced the death of a parent.
- The baby-boom years (1946 to 1965) were characterized by a relatively large share of married-couple families and high fertility rates. In 1961, 94% of children in census families were living with married parents, the highest proportion observed over the past century.
- In subsequent decades, the share of lone-parent families rose, from a low of 6% in 1961 to 15% in 1991 and to 22% in 2011. In contrast to the lone-parent families of the early 20th century, a larger proportion of these families were headed by women.
- In the early 21st century, nearly 1 million children, or 11% of all children aged 24 and under, lived in couple families in which at least one child was the biological or adopted child of only one spouse or partner.
