BY PAUL TUNS

In his under-rated and under-appreciated sociological treatise, Passion and Social Constraint, Ernst van den Haag, notes that “though the culture of each society differs from that of others, some institutions are needed in all societies to perform, in however varied ways, functions essential to any social life.” He observed that “all societies that have offspring have the institution of family.” For millennia, every culture had a dominant, and favoured, family structure whether it was wedlock, polygamy, or extended kinship. Generally, cultures that begin to disfavour long-accepted ideals of family begin to change in large and unexpected ways. The sociologist van den Haag saw that the decline of the nuclear family in the West – married mother and father with children – was accompanied by a growing faith in scientific theories and social engineering, and a reconceptualization of socialization as how to cope in groups rather than how to behave properly. The point is, once the family is undermined, the culture changes. And boy, has Canadian and other western cultures changed since the decline in the ideal of nuclear family.

Marriage and the family seem to becoming less popular in Canada and the rest of the western world, a trend that will exacerbate a number of other societal problems. Nearly every study finds a connection between children coming from intact families and better life outcomes such as graduating from high school and post-secondary education, staying out of jail, higher rates of literacy, and higher earnings when they become adults. Scholars at the Brookings Institute say that the surest way to succeed at the American Dream of a middle-class life is not to have a kid until after getting married and to get married after graduating from college and getting a job. Brookings’ scholars Isabell Sawhill has said that no social program has decreased child poverty as much as single-parenthood has increased it. The same might be true for Canada, too.

Common-law relationships

While about three-quarters of Canadians aged 25-64 lived with a partner in 2017, according to a Statistics Canada report, “partnership arrangements have evolved significantly in recent decades,” Marriage rates are declining and common-law relationships are increasing, as is the number of people living alone following separation or divorce. The General Social Survey (GSS) of Statistics Canada noted that 14.2 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 64 were divorced or separated in 2017, compared to just 8.3 per cent in 1981. 

In 2011, Statistics Canada found that 20 per cent of Canadian children lived with a parent who was divorced or separated, double the number in 2001. The majority of children who live in a single-parent household live with a divorced or separated parent, indicating that relationship breakdown is the leading cause of single-parenthood, over never-married parents having children.

Statistics compiled by Max Roser’s OurWorldInData.org shows that most western countries have experienced steadily declining marriage rates since the 1960s. Canada’s marriage rate — the number of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants in a given year — had fallen from 7.30 in 1960 to 4.40 in 2008, a decline of 40 per cent. Other countries have experienced similar decreases in their marriage rates ranging from Poland’s 38 per cent decline to America’s 46 per cent fall and a decrease of 58 per cent in Italy and Portugal.

As marriage rates decrease, common-law relationships increase (as does the number of people who live alone for extended periods of time or permanently). The percentage of Canadians living common-law has more than tripled since 1981, from 6.3 per cent to 21.1 per cent. While data are not as readily available for Canada, fully half of unmarried mothers of American children will have split up with the babies’ fathers by the time the children are five years of age. Many, but not all of those, were in common-law relationships. Studies show that common-law relationships are less stable, and that couples who live together before getting married are more likely to divorce. In Canada, couples are living together more than ever – 40 per cent of married couples in 2017 reportedly living with their future spouse before their wedding day – and for longer, on average 3.6 years compared to 2.5 years in 2006.

OurWorldInData notes that globally since the 1960s, there has been a “decoupling of parenthood and marriage,” as the share of children born outside of marriage increased in almost all economically developed countries. Prior to 1960, and through to about 1970, only about one child in ten was born out of wedlock. By 2014, however, about 70 per cent of children in Chile and Mexico were born to a single parent, as were the majority in Denmark, France, Mexico, and Sweden, and nearly half in Netherlands and the United States. About one-third of children in Canada, Australia, and Germany are born out of wedlock, while about a quarter of Italian and Polish children are. The only western countries to maintain out-of-wedlock birth rates under 10 per cent are Greece, Israel, Japan and South Korea. 

Changing attitudes

Not only is behaviour changing; so are attitudes. A 2018 poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that Canadians were about evenly split on whether it was “important” for couples in long-term relationships to get married. Nearly 40 per cent disagreed with the statement that marriage is a more genuine form of commitment than a common-law relationship. The majority of respondents did not think the government should favour marriage over common-law (59 per cent) in tax policy and that couples who split apart should have the same rights whether or not they are legally married. A Nanos Research poll found that in 2016, 21 per cent of respondents said marriage was “an outdated institution,” up moderately from 18 per cent in 2002. But the number of people who disagreed with the statement fell from 73 per cent to 56. Those under 30 were the most likely to say it was outdated (29 per cent). On the bright side, 46 per cent of those in that age cohort disagreed. Another positive: nearly three quarters of those under age 30 agreed that the concept of being married is a positive contributor to family life.

The Angus Reid survey found that a majority of Canadians (56 per cent) did not think it was important that when an unmarried man and woman has a child together, that they legally marry. The idea that children should be borne to couples committed to each other through marriage, is certainly on the wane.

The entertainment industry has long pushed the idea that life with children is a chore while life without them is full of adventure. The scholarship disagrees, although in 2019, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics made a splash when he said that women married with children were “f—ing miserable.” The happiness expert explained in his book Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life, that according to the American Time Use Survey, women admitted that they were unhappy when their husband was not in the room while the survey was taken, but they opened up and told the truth about their lives being miserable when the wife was alone. But as Hoover Institute economist Russell Roberts pointed out, that was a misreading of survey data, that the categories of “Married Spouse Present” and “Married Spouse Absent” did not mean “spouse wasn’t in the room when the question was asked” as Dolan claims, but whether the spouse was living with them. Roberts said, “So the whole premise underlying the claim in the data is simply a misreading by non-Americans of the words ‘present’ and ‘absent’.” The misreading did not stop news stories like the one in The Guardian, which declared, “We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population.” Roberts wondered “how many people will now ‘know’ that marriage and children are overrated for women because an LSE expert told them so.”

Other studies have found married women less happy than unmarried women, but when broken down, married women who work outside the home are less happy, while those who stay-at-home with kids are much happier; in other words, it was the work-life balance, rather than family life that made them less happy than their stay-at-home counterparts. 

Why is family declining?

Maxine Eichner finds that capitalism is at fault for the decline in family stability. In her book The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How it Can be Restored), the University of North Carolina law professor says that families at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder cannot give their children the resources (usually their time) to succeed in life, because they are too busy working low-wage, high-insecurity jobs to make ends meet; families further up the ladder are stuck in an endless cycle of long hours chasing the next sales or promotion, likewise robbing their kids of the most precious resource parents have: time. She purports to show that the decline in stable families and their accompanying positive life outcomes coincides with the rise of a laissez-faire attitude among governments that left families unsupported by government programs. Eichner sees deregulation, lower taxes, and fewer social programs all leading to a free-market ethos which leaves families and individuals on their own; however, the extent to which that is true is certainly up for debate. Nor would it explain the decline of the family in Scandinavian countries.

Some conservatives point to the Nordic Model – less a socialist system than a hybrid free-market, social democratic one – as the cause for the rapid decline in intact families in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, and warn that bringing the “it takes a village” ethos to North America risks undermining the family. But as the facts laid out earlier make clear, the nuclear family has already been undermined. Furthermore, there is, at best, a loose connection between the percentage of government spending for programs for children and how accepted or practiced single-parenthood is.

Restoring marriage and the importance of the nuclear family seems immune to public policy interventions. Initiatives from marriage education programs to favourable tax treatments, have had little to no effect on marriage rates. The issue is fundamentally cultural. And studies show that the best cultural explanation is religion, namely its decline.

The role of religion

In 2019, the U.S. Institute for Family Studies published its World Family Map report that examined the link between religious observance and family. A 1999 study in the American Journal of Family Therapy, found that valuing and practicing religion are associated with higher marital stability, higher levels of marital satisfaction, and an increased inclination to marry. More recent studies confirm that religious attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability. The American General Social Survey, 1972-2006, found that more than 60 per cent of people who go to church weekly believe marriage is “very important,” while just 40.8 of those who never went thought it was “very important.” And those who are more religious are also less likely to seek divorce. So as religious belief and practice decline, so, it would make sense, does the centrality of marriage in people’s lives.

A 2019 Church and Faith Trends survey by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada asked people their religious affiliation and habits today and to recall what they were when they were 12 years old. It found that while 71 per cent said they had some kind of religious affiliation when they were 12, only 43 per cent did today. Fully half called themselves atheist, agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious ,or no affiliation (AASN), although just 40 per cent of those people were AASN when they were 12. (Statistics Canada reports that just four per cent of the population was religiously unaffiliated in 1971, indicating rapid secularization among the population.) The Faith Trends survey found that more than 83 per cent of people who were 12 years old before 1964 were Christian by the age of 12, but that number fell precipitously with later generations. Just 66 per cent of Gen-X (born 1965-1981), 54 per cent of Gen Y (1982-1996) and 44 per cent of Gen Z (1997-2012) were Christian at the age of 12. Many of these people still “relocated to the AASN camp.” Half of all people who remember going to a church service at the age of 12, have not attended one in the 12 months before the survey. The Silent Generation (pre-1945) and Baby Boomers (1945-1964) were brought up religious, but they raised irreligious children and grandchildren. For most age groups, the survey found that just about 10 per cent of people attended weekly church service.

The decline in religious observance has coincided with the decline in marriage and attitudes about its importance. The sociologist van den Haag said that once marriage “is no longer hemmed in and supported by other functions and by religious beliefs which in the past made it a permanent bond, wedlock becomes synchronous with the satisfaction of the needs felt by the pair linked by it.” Therefore, if satisfaction wanes, one, or both partners, feels free to walk away from the commitment. Once divorce was liberalized in 1968 and again when the Divorce Act was amended in 1986 to make more favourable terms for women in divorce cases, the number of divorces in Canada spiked immediately (in 1986 there were almost 62,000 divorces in Canada, but more than 96,000 the next year before settling in at about 70,000 a year afterward). 

The decline in marriage is a giant social experiment, and the early results – increased deaths of despair (suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths), an astronomical rise in depression and anxiety, the emergence of social-media addicted young adults – all indicate it is a massive failure. Governments might apply the Hippocratic Oath approach to governing (“Do no harm”), but it is not obvious, short of a religious revival, what might restore the nuclear family to its rightful place as the building block of society.