Canada

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

The latest 2011 census data - focused on family dynamics, dwellings and marital status - illustrates a very different version of Canada than the one that was familiar a half-century ago. The family photo of Mom, Dad and their 2.1 kids is now crowded with foster kids, grandparents living in the family home, same-sex couples and moms going it alone. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Leigh Tynan

The nuclear family is no longer the norm in Canada.

The mom-pop-and-three-kids-under-one-roof model that typified Canadian households of 50 years ago has morphed into a complex and diverse web of family ties involving living alone, re-marriage, stepchildren, empty-nesters and multiple generations sharing a home.

Statistics Canada has released the third batch of new data from its 2011 census, this time portraying the changes in Canadian families and living arrangements over five decades.

Married couples are in a long-term decline, single parenting has risen persistently, and families have gradually shrunk. The average family was 3.9 people in 1961, when the baby boom was in full swing. Now, it's 2.9.

"We do see more complexity and definitely more diversity in families," said Statistics Canada demographer Anne Milan.

For the first time, Statistics Canada says there are more people living alone in Canada than there are couples with children. One-person households now make up 27.6 per cent of all homes, a three-fold increase since 1961 that is especially notable in Quebec.

Meanwhile, couples with children have continued their decline, down to 26.5 per cent of all households, from 28.5 per cent in 2006.

Just 10 years ago, couples with children under 24 years old made up 43.6 per cent of all families (not including one-person households), by far the most typical kind of family.

Now, parents with children make up just 39.2 per cent of families, and a rising proportion of those parents are not officially married. The number of common-law couples surged almost 14 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

For the first time in 2011, Statistics Canada also measured the number of stepfamilies in the country, showing that now one in 10 children lives in some sort of reconstituted arrangement.

"The modern family is changing, and I think it's a wonderful thing," said Shannon Kennedy, an Ottawa-based wedding planner who finds herself on the front lines of fluctuating living arrangements on a daily basis. "The rules of a nuclear family just don't apply any more."

In 2011, the most typical family was a couple with no children, continuing a pattern spotted in 2006. Statistics Canada found that 44.5 per cent of families have no kids at home, partly reflecting the aging of the baby-boomer bulge, the leading edge of which has started turning 65.

Overall, there were 9.4 million families in Canada in 2011, a 5.5 per cent increase from 2006.

Despite a growing population overall, the number of married couples declined outright by 132,715 over the past decade.

Lone-parent families and multiple-family households, on the other hand, were on the rise. Single parents increased by 8.0 per cent from 2006, and more of those parents were fathers — although eight out of 10 lone parents were still mothers.

Same-sex couples were also on a steep incline, up 42.4 per cent from 2006. About half of these couples were married, while the rest were common-law. Still, same-sex couples only made up 0.8 per cent of all couples in 2011.

The wide variety of family ties is throwing wedding-planner Kennedy for a loop. Emily Post, the guru of etiquette for most of the 20th century, is no longer of much help, she said.

"You don't necessarily have two families. In some cases, you have four families coming together at a wedding."

Now any number of people can be included in the 'walking up the aisle', even forming a "relay" with one parent handing off the bride to a second or third parent halfway to the altar.

"Any scenario where you get more than one mom involved, you have to kind of juggle that," Kennedy said with a chuckle.

"The best thing about modern weddings is, there are no rules."