Peter Jon Mitchell: Declining married families across Canada means children will become rarities - National Post

Canada has a unique cultural fabric that is all our own. Photo by Marcio Binow Da Silva /Getty ImagesArticle content“Babies,” which recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the story of a longtime married couple deciding not to have children. The comedy is the definitive answer to the question the celebrity couple, director Lauren Miller Rogen and husband Seth Rogen, have fielded for years: when are you going to have a baby?

The decision whether to have children is rather personal, and it is easy to empathize with a couple who have faced scrutiny over their decision. Even so, the cultural norm of associating babies with marriage is a good thing.

Canadians are free, for the most part, to form families as they choose, yet the married family structure remains the most common family form for raising children. Marriage is correlated with positive outcomes for adults and children, which can, in turn, positively impact individuals and communities.

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Marriage as a social institution has been correlated with improved health, economic advantages and increased social mobility for the parents. Children growing up in a family home with two married parents are more likely to enjoy lifelong benefits that include higher educational attainment, as well as positive mental health and emotional well-being.

Despite the prevalence of married families with kids, this family form has been retreating across Canada for decades. The Canadian Married Families Index (CMFI), developed by the think tank Cardus, aims to measure the tempo of this substantial change within individual provinces and territories over the last two decades.

The index combines three federal census data points measured between 2001 and 2021: total fertility rate, the portion of adults aged 25 to 54 who are married, and the proportion of children 14 and under living with their married parents.

A baseline score of 100 points was developed for each region for the 2001 census. Changes in regional index scores were measured over four censuses. The index compares provinces and territories to their own baseline rather than comparing regions to a national standard score.