Freedom to choose family ties

Society has learned to treat adults as adults when it comes to their relationships and families.

The social trends in the 2011 census come as no shock. You’d have to be as out of touch as an isolated English country squire not to know about the decline of the traditional marriage and the rise of new variants on the family that would have that same chap sending servants running for the brandy.

But Canadians are doubtless still startled this week at the speed and extent to which the traditional family is losing its dominance as an organizing norm of Canadian life. Fortunately, as we have gradually learned over the years, it’s part of a process that has taught us that freedom of choice and the quality of relationships are more important than form and structure.

The male-female couple raising children within a formal marriage still dominates the demographic picture, it should be noted. Two-thirds of families are still made up of married people and 39 per cent of all family units are couples with children living at home. Whatever older Canadians may sometimes think, those numbers make clear that while the new paths may get all the attention, a great many members of the latest generation still see a positive example to follow in their parents’ lives.

But clearly, the 1950s are as long gone as servants bearing restoratives. The number of common-law couples has quadrupled over the last three decades alone, and other comparisons with the last century are almost as arresting. In the 1961 census, almost 92 per cent of couples were married, compared with just 67 per cent today, and fully half of the single-adult families were the result of a spouse’s death. Today the number associated with widowhood is 17.7 per cent, while divorce accounts for 50.8 per cent and never-marrieds for 31.5 per cent of single-adult families.

Also, in a change that tends to get forgotten with all our debates about the choices of the adults involved — the rise of commonlaw and same-sex relationships, and the increase in divorce — we have seen astonishing changes in child-rearing.

These days we tend to single out the trend toward adult children still living with their parents. But in the grand scheme of things, this is minor next to the fall in the number of the children per family and the rise in the number of families with no kids at all.

What should we draw from all this? Does a healthy society require the discipline of a marriage, and one less easily dissolved? Does the gradual trend away from child-rearing — something that was almost an obligation in more religious times — bode ill for society in ways ranging from reduced elder care to the cultural pressure of increased immigration?

Half a century ago, our parents and grandparents would have seen the glass as much worse than half-empty, especially if they had known what was coming. Many people today associate crime and drug use with unstable family backgrounds.

But the old strictures led to a great many unhappy marriages and unhappy single people, and to children whose memories of childhood are light years from the Norman Rockwell model. Today, to a far greater extent, individuals form and stay in relationships because they choose to, not because of other people’s preferences.

In a culture that places great stock in freedom, how is that a bad thing — either for the partners, for their children or for a society that must backstop the costs of failed relationships from which participants see no escape?

Undoubtedly in the years since divorce and single-parenthood became more acceptable, many people did make marital and family decisions too lightly, or for the wrong reasons. But people — and their children — learn in this area of human life probably even more quickly than they learn the best way of conducting their professional lives.

Surely, we see this in the statistics about so-called blended families, which now account for one in eight. We see it in the ecstatic smiles of newly married same-sex couples. And, when you think about it, we also see it reflected in the number of adult children still happy to live with their parents.

Sometimes, official discussions about population trends sound a bit like debates about animal husbandry, redolent as they often are with talk of populations rather than with the individual. But over the last 50 years, we have developed a clearer appreciation of human beings as distinct and diverse individuals. We have learned that social cohesion and general productive contentment is increased, not decreased, when we focus on how people behave toward one another rather than on the rules they follow.

You might say that over that half-century, society has learned to treat adults as adults when it comes to their relationships and families, just as it has learned to abandon the old-school paternalism that once kept our free-market economic system from reaching its full potential.