When Imran Rehal finishes her night shift at a treatment facility for youth in Edmonton, she drives home to relieve her kids’ overnight sitter, and then prepares chocolate chip waffles for them.
After breakfast‚ she drives her two sons – who are three and four years old – to daycare and then, depending on what day of the week it is, she’ll either return home to get some sleep or drive to another family’s house where she babysits three days a week. The extra work helps pay for child care, which the specialists working with her younger son, who has a speech delay, insist is important for his progress because of the socialization he gets there.
Come the weekend, Ms. Rehal will drive across town to a Costco, where a single parents’ organization has arranged for the company to donate items that have been returned and food that is close to its expiry date.
Ms. Rehal, a 33-year-old child and youth counsellor, has raised her sons by herself ever since her separation in 2020 – and it hasn’t been easy, financially or emotionally.
“I have to be positive. I am everything to my kids. If I’m a depressed person and I’m always miserable, they’re going to see and feed off of that,” she says. She moved to Edmonton in 2014, leaving behind her parents and five siblings in the Toronto area because the job market and housing affordability were better in Alberta.
Like Ms. Rehal, single parents across Canada are struggling, and their numbers have been rising for decades. There are now more children being raised by single parents than ever in Canada – nearly 1.15 million as of 2021, up from 289,000 in 1976, according to Statistics Canada. And yet, the ideal of the two-parent nuclear family persists, and we’ve built much of our way of life around it. Today, being able to house and feed a family, shuttle kids to and from school (or else pay for child care during work hours), all while saving for retirement, is premised on two people under one roof sharing the load.
Despite single parents needing extra help to make it work, existing financial aid policies still seem to take only the nuclear families into account, and are inadequate when it comes to those struggling the most. When you add onto that the stigma still attached to single parenthood, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing rising rates of depression and anxiety among those raising kids on their own.
While advocacy groups are coming up with proposals to help these families, including increasing government benefits and lowering daycare costs, it isn’t coming soon enough for many people, some of whom resort to skipping meals to keep a roof over their heads. Compared to Canada’s child poverty rate of 8 per cent for kids in coupled families, the rate for children raised by single parents is 44 per cent, according to UNICEF Canada.
That alarming discrepancy doesn’t show single parents are failing their kids, it’s proof we’re failing single parents, says Sevaun Palvetzian, the humanitarian organization’s president and CEO.
“We choose our level of child poverty through our policy choices,” she says.
One-fifth of all kids in Canada today are being raised by single parents. Although the vast majority of those parents are women, the rise in single fathers over the last two decades has brought that number down from 86 per cent in 1976 to 80 per cent today.
These parents are raising kids on their own for a myriad reasons: divorce with full or partial custody, women conceiving via a sperm donor, the death of a partner.
What almost all of them have in common are financial and logistical struggles far beyond what a couple raising kids together face.
With the rise in inflation and interest rates over the past two years, many Canadians are struggling to pay for housing and put food on the table. But when it comes to types of families, no group is having a harder time providing those necessities during this stormy period than single parents, according to a survey of more than 1,500 Canadians by the Salvation Army released in December.
While 25 per cent of Canadians surveyed fear they don’t have enough income to cover their basic needs, that number climbs to 40 per cent for single parent households. The survey also found that 44 per cent of single parents reported eating less so their kids could eat, compared to 22 per cent of coupled parents.
And while dual-earner families with two children in Canada have a median employment income of $130,000, according to Statistics Canada, single parents with two kids only manage to bring in a third of that.
Single parents struggling
Poverty rate in Canada
Single parents
44%
Canada
18%
Couples
8%
Children raised by single parents
2021
1.15 million
289,000
1976
Median employment income
Dual-earner couples (2 children)
$130,000
$43,000
Single-earner parents (2 children)
Canadians not having enough income to cover basic needs
All Canadians
25%
Single parents
40%
Canadians eating less so their kids can eat
22%
All Canadians
44%
Single parents
the globe and mail, Source: statistics canada; salvation army;
unicef canada
Single parents struggling
Poverty rate in Canada
Single parents
44%
Canada
18%
Couples
8%
Children raised by single parents
2021
1.15 million
289,000
1976
Median employment income
Dual-earner couples (2 children)
$130,000
$43,000
Single-earner parents (2 children)
Canadians not having enough income to cover basic needs
All Canadians
25%
Single parents
40%
Canadians eating less so their kids can eat
22%
All Canadians
44%
Single parents
the globe and mail, Source: statistics canada; salvation army;
unicef canada
Single parents struggling
Poverty rate in Canada
Single parents
44%
Canada
18%
Couples
8%
Children raised by single parents
2021
1.15 million
289,000
1976
Median employment income
Dual-earner couples (2 children)
$130,000
$43,000
Single-earner parents (2 children)
Canadians not having enough income to cover basic needs
All Canadians
25%
Single parents
40%
Canadians eating less so their kids can eat
22%
All Canadians
44%
Single parents
the globe and mail, Source: statistics canada; salvation army;unicef canada
To make up for the gap, some single parents resort to working multiple jobs. Two nights a week, after Mary Kapongo – a mother to a nine-year-old son – finishes her workday doing customer service for an insurance company, she heads to her part-time gig cleaning a church near her home in Edmonton. Since she can’t afford to hire a sitter, she brings her son with her.
Recently, on the way to the church, her son brought up an after-school coding class he’s eager to take – but even with working two jobs and the monthly payment she gets from the federal Canada Child Benefit, she can’t afford the $200 cost for the class. The same goes for summer camps and sports programs, she says. “He’ll say, ‘Mommy, I want to be part of this, I want to be part of that.’ But I can’t provide that to him. It’s too much.”
Ms. Kapongo is having a hard enough time just making sure her son has enough to eat, let alone being able to afford extracurricular activities. “There’s moments where I go grocery shopping to make sure that he has food. And then I’m like, I can survive on noodles.”
Ms. Kapongo recently started a group called “I AM Village” for single parents to meet up and connect with each other, as well as get advice from guest speakers on managing finances and other issues they face. “Even though everybody’s suffering in some way, this group of people are actually suffering more,” she says.
Single parents, especially single mothers, almost always fare worse during times of economic hardship compared to their counterparts raising children with a partner. During the pandemic, for example, the term “she-cession” was used as a catch-all for women who had to leave the work force for one reason or another. Often they were mothers who left their employment to look after their children when schools went online and daycares closed.
As things opened up again, single mothers had a much harder time climbing out of the she-cession than partnered moms. An analysis of Statistics Canada labour force data found that from February, 2020, to the end of 2021, the employment rate for mothers with partners was up 4.5 per cent, while the employment rate for single mothers with children six and under was down 36 per cent.
Since the 1940s, when people began moving away from home for work, and the nuclear family grew as a common living arrangement in North America, we’ve tended to assume that raising children is a two-person job.
That assumption was a safe one in 1961, when married couples accounted for 91.6 per cent of census families. But now, with the number of two-parent non-step families less than half that, and the number of single parents nearly doubling since that time, it’s increasingly becoming an outdated notion – and our policies have yet to catch up.
The concept of the nuclear family is itself a financially fragile one, and has long been propped up by government support.
Married couples are helped out particularly when it comes to taxes, says Cindy David, president of Cindy David Financial Group Ltd., a Vancouver-based firm. The advantages they receive include spousal tax credits, pension income splitting, pooled medical expenses and the ability to transfer tax credits from one spouse to another, she explains.
There are also many ways in which spouses can defer tax payments by transferring retirement funds or property from one partner to another, options that are unavailable to single parents.
“There are spousal rollover provisions for pretty much everything in the Income Tax Act,” she says.
Meanwhile, the Canada Child Benefit (CCB), a monthly tax-exempt payment to parents with children under 18, has been one of the biggest family policy initiatives of the past decade, helping to lift more than 430,000 children out of poverty since its introduction in 2016.
Canada Child Benefit recipients got a cost-of-living boost this past July 20, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau played with these families at the Boys and Girls clubs in Kingston.Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press
These policies have been helpful to all families, but the problem, say sociologists, economists and child poverty welfare organizations, is that we haven’t offered the additional supports that so many single parents need, even as their number continues to grow.
In its December report, UNICEF Canada recommended implementing a low-income supplement to the CCB. This was a reaction, in part, to the rising child poverty rate in Canada over the last two years, says Ms. Palvetzian. Currently, she says, nearly one million children in this country live in poverty – and the prevalence of child poverty among single-parent households is shamefully high.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has proposed creating a supplement to the CCB that would provide an additional $8,500 each year to families with an earned income of less than $19,000. This would be on top of the current maximum a family can receive, which is approximately $7,500 annually for each child under six.
Doing so would cut child poverty nearly in half, and would be especially significant for single parent households, according to the independent, non-partisan research institute based in Toronto.
To show how even a very small increase could make a difference, University of Toronto researchers published a study last year looking at the effect of raising the CCB payment by just $60 a month. Researchers showed that bump would reduce the probability of food insecurity among families with young children by nearly three percentage points, from 24.3 per cent to 21.4 per cent, while cutting that likelihood among lone-parent families by almost 6 per cent.
To show how even a very small increase could make a difference, University of Toronto researchers published a study last year that helps us imagine the effect of raising the CCB payment by just $60 a month. Research showed that bump reduced the probability of food insecurity among families with young children by nearly three percentage points, from 24.3 per cent to 21.4 per cent, while lone-parent families who received the additional $60 per month saw their likelihood reduced by almost 6 per cent.
“An expansion of the Canada Child Benefit would be one of the things that would improve life for single parents and would improve life for low-income and precarious workers in general,” says Lars Osberg, a professor of economics at Dalhousie University.
Mr. Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford watch ministers sign a $10-a-day child care deal in 2022.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The Canada-wide early learning and child care agreement, which promises to reduce fees to an average of $10 by 2026, is another policy initiative from the current federal government that also needs changes to better help single parents, child care advocates say.
So far, fees have been reduced by an average of 50 per cent across the country, and some $10 a day spots have opened, but the demand for child care still far outstrips supply.
Marla Pickering was able to get a spot for her daughter at a $10-a-day centre in Vancouver in 2021, a relief from the $475 a month she spent previously.
“The cost of child care here is atrocious,” says the 46-year-old registered massage therapist. “I’m super lucky.”
But even $10 a day represents a large portion of her budget, and if she had another child she could not afford to have them both in care, she says.
Campaign2000, a non-partisan organization dedicated to ending poverty, says child care fees under the federal deal should be on a sliding scale down to zero for low-income families.
Adopting such a scale would improve the mandate of the child care deal to act as an economic stimulus project by helping more single parents enter the work force, says Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a Toronto-based non-profit organization.
Owing to the difficulties in finding an affordable child care arrangement, low-income parents and single parents are more than twice as likely to postpone or discontinue their schooling or training compared to higher income parents and parents in two-parent families.
“If this is going to be made equitable, it takes policy,” Ms. Friendly says.
Denmark, where these children celebrated King Frederick X's succession in January, is one of the countries that outclasses Canada in child-focused income benefits.Martin Meissner/The Associated Press
The shortcomings of Canada’s family policies for single parents becomes especially glaring when compared to other wealthy nations.
Canada ranks 25th out of 38 wealthy nations in its level of spending on child-focused income benefits, according to the UNICEF Canada report. And Canada is only one of 10 countries on that list where the child poverty rate for single parent households is above 40 per cent.
In countries that offer more robust supports, such as Denmark, Finland and Slovenia, the child poverty rate is 10 per cent or less.
Family policies that are more supportive of single parents help explain much of that difference. For example, Denmark covers 75 per cent of child care costs, and children in Slovenia are legally entitled to a publicly-subsidized child care spot. Meanwhile, child care fees in Finland are based on a family’s income and size, often resulting in free care for low-income families thanks to child care benefits.
All three countries also offer generous parental leave policies, which means single parents don’t have to juggle care and jobs in that crucial first year or two.
Ugo Ahana long believed that fatherhood meant marriage and a house with white picket fences, and feels that many people still believe that. But being a single parent has led him to question his own assumptions, and the judgments of others.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
One reason why single parents haven’t been more of a priority for politicians and policy-makers could be owing to the stigma that has historically surrounded them, one created from seeing them as regrettable deviations from the norm of the nuclear family.
“There is a kind of cultural bias that we often have when we think of single parents,” says Sid Frankel, an associate professor of social work at the University of Manitoba, and a committee member of Campaign2000. “There’s a kind of disdain that these are not necessarily deserving families.”
Even as the number of single parents is growing, so too, it seems, is the stigma of being one – at least south of the border, where the proportion of single parents is even higher than in Canada.
A survey of U.S. residents conducted by the Pew Research Center and released in 2022 found 47 per cent of adults believed single women raising children on their own is generally bad for society, up from 40 per cent in 2018.
And now that fathers are taking on the single-parent role more often, they feel that judgment as well.
“Sometimes you feel like if you’re not raising your kids in a nuclear family, you’re not raising them properly,” says Ugo Ahana, a 48-year-old single father in Brampton who works in I.T.
For most of his life, Mr. Ahana says, he believed being a successful father meant being married and raising children in a house with a white picket fence.
“In retrospect, I know it’s not the best measuring tape for success in a lot of ways,” he says. “But you just look at it as the norm. And if you’re not the norm, then you’re a failure.”
'In retrospect, I know it’s not the best measuring tape for success in a lot of ways,' Mr. Ahana says of the nuclear family.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
That feeling of failure is made worse by the sheer exhaustion felt by single parents who can’t afford to hire help.
Julie Butterworth, a teacher in Ottawa whose daughter is now five years old, remembers the first time she fell asleep at 7 p.m. after so many stressful years of trying to get her baby down at a reasonable hour.
“I was expecting to feel free and instead it had the opposite effect. I just wanted to go for a walk and I couldn’t leave the house,” she says.
Ms. Butterworth acknowledges that, in today’s economy, couples raising kids together also struggle to find down time or pay for help. “Everybody is tired, no one has enough money. No one has enough help.”
Still, she says it’s amplified for parents like her. And the degree to which those issues are more intense for single parents turn up again and again in how it affects their mental health. Studies have shown that rates of reported depressive and anxiety symptoms are twice as high among single mothers compared to partnered mothers.
Physical health takes a toll as well. In a 2018 study, researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto found single fathers’ risk of premature mortality was three times higher than that of partnered dads.
Overcoming the stigma of single parenthood as a society is important because there is nothing inherent about being a single parent that produces worse mental health or educational outcomes for children, says Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“In some studies, where it first looks like the kids of married parents are doing better, if you then control for financial resources statistically – so that you’re comparing families with the same household income – then you find that the children of single parents are doing just as well,” she says.
Lee Francis worries that governments aren’t making life easier for single parents like her.Kelsey McMillan / The Globe and Mail
As it is, the current state of things is unsustainable for both the kids and their parents.
“This is a crazy-making lifestyle,” says Lee Francis, a 53-year-old data specialist at NorQuest College in Edmonton.
Ms. Francis has been raising her two sons, who are now 15 and 17, by herself since 2013.
Both of her sons are neurodivergent, and the challenges of getting them to school, battling with the school to get the supports they need, navigating a health care system that often has a woeful access to her kids’ treatment needs, all while trying to deal with the demands of her career with no partner to fall back on for help, is overwhelmingly stressful.
Policy-makers at every level of government aren’t doing nearly enough to help people like her, Ms. Francis says.
“What do I want them to know about being a single parent? We’re doing a really hard job. Stop making it harder.”
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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the details of research conducted by University of Toronto researchers, who sought to determine the impact on food insecurity for households receiving an the extra $60 in CCB for their children under 6, compared with food insecurity among households with children 6 and up who did not receive the extra $60.