Projects

Families Count 2024

Vanier Institute’s new resource explores three decades of change, continuity, and complexity among families in Canada. Released during the International Year of the Family’s 30th anniversary, Families Count 2024 provides statistical portraits of families in Canada, highlights trends over time, and offers insights on what it all means for families and family life.

Family work: how family members support and provide for each other

Work is an essential part of family life. Whether it takes the form of paid employment, unpaid household work, or caring for children and/or adults, family members provide for each other in diverse ways that support their wellbeing. In the Family Diversities and Wellbeing Framework, the Family Work lens is rooted in a broad understanding of “work” that focuses on the full range of paid and unpaid responsibilities associated with family life.

The ways that families organize and distribute this work have been shaped by ever-changing social, economic, cultural, and environmental circumstances. Chapters in this section use the Family Work lens to identify and highlight patterns of inequality in how paid and unpaid work is distributed within families. Data show that these patterns have changed over time in a context of shifting gender roles, population aging, and greater insecurity in the labour market and economy.

Women’s participation in the paid labour market has increased substantially in the past half century, and their economic contributions play a growing role in families’ financial capacities, resilience, and wellbeing. Even so, gender inequality persists, as reflected in wage and poverty gaps and lower labour force attachment. Men have been spending more time caring for children and on household labour, but data show that women continue to perform most of this work.

Although baby boomers are no longer the largest generation in Canada, population aging is projected to continue for decades, which will continue to shape the relationship between families and work. As the labour force continues to age, a growing proportion of older adults—many of whom are grandparents—are staying in the paid labour market. Some of these older workers provide financial support to younger generations. Yet, doing so can affect their ability to provide adequately for themselves or retire from the paid labour force at a time of their choosing.

The nature of work has also changed, with recent advances in information and communications technology (e.g., high-speed internet, smartphones, and online collaboration platforms) making a growing number of jobs possible to do from home. The COVID-19 pandemic made employers, employees, and policymakers reassess assumptions about how, when, and where paid work should take place. Although many employees express a preference to some degree of remote work, this is not an option for many, depending on what they do or where they live. Conversely, many family members travel far from home to make a living, but there is growing evidence that this mobility has an impact on their families and communities.

Family Work is about how people go about acquiring the resources they need to support their families. Chapters in this section use this lens to recognize the full spectrum of family work, examine patterns of inequality, and look at how some of the public and workplace policies have supported, hindered, or otherwise shaped family work arrangements.