The Canadian family is slowly being reshaped
TORY ZIMMERMAN/TORONTO STAR

Sep 13, 2007 04:30 AM
Francine Kopun
Feature Writer
The Toronto Star
For the full article, please see:
http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/256085

Sean Slaven cannot imagine his life without the routine of picking up his 11-year-old son Brendan after school, monitoring his homework, making his favourite meal of Indian butter chicken, and then playing ball or watching the season finale of Canadian Idol together.

Slaven, 42, is the male head of a single-parent family – one of a growing number of men in Canada who care for their children half or more than half of the time. He shares custody of his son with his former wife, and Brendan is with him as much as 65 per cent of the time. Slaven wouldn't want it any other way.

"If you're an access parent you're a visitor in that child's life. You're always trying to do things that are fun, fun, fun – you don't get involved with their school, you don't get involved with their lives. They're strangers to you," says Slaven, a self-employed sales professional in Burlington.

According to 2006 census data released yesterday, lone-parent families headed by men increased 14.6 per cent during the five years prior to 2006; lone-parent families headed by women increased 6.3 per cent.

In fact, the Canadian family is slowly being reshaped: Marriage continues to lose ground to common-law relationships, same-sex unions are on the rise and families without children have become more common than families with children as the population ages and fertility rates decline.

"Family has always been a dynamic institution," said Alan Mirabelli, executive associate of the Vanier Institute for the Family. "If you ask people what their ideal of family is, they'll simply describe the family they grew up in, but family goes back 3,000 years. It transforms itself."

The 2006 census enumerated nearly 9 million families in Canada. Married couples constituted the largest group at 68.6 per cent, but their proportion has been steadily decreasing for 20 years. The proportion of common-law families meanwhile, has been growing in leaps and bounds. In 1986, they accounted for 7.2 per cent of all census families. Now they account for 15.5 per cent.

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