Desire to have children increasing among Canadians: Statistics Canada study
The desire among Canadians to have children is increasing according to new study from Statistics Canada.
Leading this overall upward shift from 2021 to 2024 were Canadians without any current biological children, residents of Ontario and the Prairie provinces, women aged 15 to 24 and never-married Canadians, say the study’s authors Victoria Jordan and Maire Sinha.
Making plans for the future: Canadians’ intentions to have biological children ,” states that 64 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 years want at least one child, or another one. That’s up from 53 per cent in 2021.
“Having a positive future outlook is linked to a higher likelihood of wanting biological children,” write the study’s authors. “In 2024, half (50 per cent) of people who always or often had a hopeful outlook wanted children in the future, compared with 36 per cent of people who rarely or never had a hopeful outlook on life.”
The authors note that in recent years, Canada’s fertility rate has been decreasing, reaching a record low of 1.25 children per woman in 2024. That meets the criteria of an “ultra-low” fertility country, they say. And it means that such a country could face challenges that come with aging populations such as strains on the labour force and pressure on the public health care and pension systems.
In part, the decline has been due to shifting fertility patterns since the 1960s, in particular, because women have been delaying having children till their 30s.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also hard on fertility, say Jordan and Sinha. Economic uncertainty, public health measures and issues related to social connections and relationships got in the way. In 2021, 41 per cent of Canadians wanted their own children in the future. Three years later, that percentage rose to 46 per cent.
In 2021, Quebec held the top position in Canada — with the greatest proportion of people wanting children compared with all other regions. By 2024, the share of people in Quebec wanting children remained high (47 per cent), but people in Ontario joined them in the top spot (48 per cent), up from 41 per cent in 2021.
Young people are leading the increase in plans to have biological children, Jordan and Sinha note. In 2021, just over half (53 per cent) of Canadians aged 15 to 24 reported that they intended to either have a child for the first time or have additional children. This figure increased by more than 10 percentage points to 64 per cent in 2024. The increase was exclusively due to an increase among young women, from 50 per cent in 2021 to 63 per cent in 2024.
Canadians aged 15 to 24 who reported that they plan to have children also intended to have the most children of any age group, at 2.4 intended children in 2024. People aged 25 to 34 who intended to have children wanted 2.0 children, while those aged 35 to 49 planned to have an average of 1.6 children.
Never-married people were consistently more likely than people in a married or common-law relationship to either want children for the first time or have additional children. They also planned to have more children than their married counterparts: 2.3 versus 1.8 children, respectively, in 2024.
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