What makes a family? Like most things it's all relative
Province
By Shannon Proudfoot
October 5, 2010

EXCERPT only

— Couples without children now outnumber those with children in Canada, but fewer than half of Canadians believe a married or common-law couple with no children counts as a family. A similar minority considers a same-sex married couple and their children to be a family.

— Nearly one in five Canadian children lives in a lone-parent household, but only a slim majority of 55 per cent of Canadians believe a single mother and her children constitute a family and 54 per cent see a single father and his children as a family.

— For the first time, there are more unmarried than married people in Canada, according to the most recent census data (2006), and common-law families — particularly those with children — are the fastest-growing family type in Canada. Yet poll results from Ipsos Reid show that while 80 per cent of Canadians believe two married, heterosexual parents and their children constitute a family, just 66 per cent consider a common-law couple and their children to be a family….

Today, the Ottawa-based research and advocacy organization releases Families Count, an encyclopedic book of Canadian family trends and statistics published every five years. The release coincides this year with National Family Week in Canada.

There's "no question" that families have changed profoundly over the last 50 years, the report says, but it also highlights surprising stability lying beneath the surface….

Lone-parent families may be increasingly common, but they're nothing new, he says. That family type was widespread in the 1930s, he says, although in that era it was created most often by death or family desertion during the Great Depression rather than through divorce.

"We didn't invent single-parent families. They've always been part of the cultural fabric of Canadian society," Glossop says. "There was a period when Canadians thought that was a function of feminism in the late 60s and kids growing up and overthrowing the traditional family, as though lone-parent families had never existed before."…

"Families have never been stable and unchanging, and every family form has its own distinctive set of problems. That's how the world works, that's how history works, that's how personal life works. You never just reach a stasis and stay there," says Coontz. …