HAMILTON, Ontario, June 3, 2016 (LifeSiteNews ) – Most Canadians consider their family life as very important and believe marriage plays an important and positive role in it, according to a survey released this week by the conservative Christian think tank Cardus. But Canadians also admit to having significantly fewer children then they want, and, in the last decade, have become “more ambivalent about the role of marriage as a social institution,” reports Cardus.
“I look at the positive here,” the study’s co-author, Andrea Mrozek, told LifeSiteNews. Though positive views of marriage and family are lower than in the past, they are still very high. “There is a lot for us to work with,” she said.
In a finding that matches results in Western Europe, the study shows Canadians want 2.76 children, just below the 2.8 ideal that has held steady for decades of Canadians. But Canada’s fertility rate shows they are actually having just 1.7 children (the “replacement rate” that would maintain Canada’s population with zero net immigration is 2.1).
Cardus found that people who actually had any children averaged 2.3 children each, suggesting having children at all is a bigger issue than how many to have. Supporting that interpretation, only half of Canadians said that having the number of children they ideally wanted is important, while 93 percent said having a positive family life is very important.
Why the gap between the ideal and actual family size? The cost involved was cited by 29 percent of those surveyed and was by far the greatest single challenge to having children. “People have to go to university or college, to pay down their student debt, to get established financially, so they put off having children,” said Mrozek. “Still, it says something about Canadians, considering we are among the wealthiest people in the world, that money is the biggest problem.”
At the same time, the report tracks a dwindling regard for marriage. Among 18 to 29-year-olds, 72 percent view marriage as making a positive contribution to family life, while 89 percent of those over 60 do so.
Mrozek blames the culture, saying that society sends few messages encouraging marriage or having children. “There is a lot of messages to teenage girls not to have children,” she told LifeSiteNews, while older women get no encouragement to have them at all. Cardus’s recent examination of Ontario’s controversial sex education curriculum found it “had nothing about marriage at all.”
The study speculates that the two are connected. “The decreased interest in having children may also be correlated with the uncertainty around marriage,” it states. “Canadians, while still getting married, are more uncertain about marriage than they were in yesteryear. Scholars surmise that divorce and uncertainty about marriage result in lower fertility.”
What can government do to help families and encourage children? The study’s participants were clear: a majority called for direct financial assistance to parents, either in per-child subsidies or tax breaks, as opposed to funding for day care centres or in-school early childhood programs.
However, Mrozek told LifeSiteNews that politicians show little understanding of the importance of marriage except at election time. “It’s one reason why so many Canadians don’t trust them,” she said. But marriage, she insists, has been shown by social science to “be good for the economy, for wellness in terms of physical and mental health of everyone involved, for many things.”
While parents benefit, children especially do better in a stable, natural marriage than the alternatives in terms of success in school and afterwards, their own relationships afterwards, and in lower involvement with crime.
“Despite changes over the last number of decades, Canadians clearly retain a belief in the value of and the desire for a happy home,” the report sums up.