Rachel Cairns always knew she wanted to have a child someday. But she didn’t start thinking seriously about the particulars—when, where, and how she would afford it—until the instance she chose not to. In 2019, she had an abortion after an intrauterine device slipped out of place and she got pregnant. At the time, Cairns was thirty-one and had been working as an actor and director in Toronto. “My twenties were so career driven,” she says. “I had the choice, but it didn’t feel like one. I peed on the stick and immediately thought, This can’t happen right now.”
If it had, she’d have been financially dependent on her fiancé, Will, who works in waste management in a senior position. The one-bedroom apartment where they live could barely fit a crib, and it isn’t where she imagined she’d raise a child. “Certainly, it was doable,” she says, noting that people parent every day with less. “But it wasn’t what I wanted.” The experience got Cairns thinking seriously about what she hoped to have in place before becoming a mother and how much the idea of choice is intertwined with socio-economic realities. In summer 2022, she launched Aborsh, a podcast about reproductive justice in Canada. The following year, she wrote and performed Hypothetical Baby, a play about the mental calculations that led to her decision not to continue her pregnancy.
Now, at thirty-six, Cairns is ready to set things in motion for parenthood, and she and Will have been apartment hunting. What they wanted in place has changed since 2019, she says, but not by much: a two-bedroom apartment, in Toronto, where they both work—and where, as a sessional instructor at George Brown College, Cairns could eventually qualify for the employment insurance (EI) benefits that parental leave relies on. They’re hoping for a unit that caps out at $3,000 a month, just slightly less than the city’s average and 30 percent more than what they spend now. Their household income of $150,000 can shoulder the increase, but their search has so far turned up dead ends. Sometimes, they find the right place but without en suite laundry (this matters with a newborn) or up two flights of stairs. Or it’s the right place with the right amenities but at an out-of-budget price that would eat into what they’d otherwise be saving for retirement and their child’s education.
Time, relationships, identity, and, yes, finances: for a few years, a child’s arrival can upend anyone’s world. But between the housing crisis, an underperforming child care system, soaring food costs, and a status-driven culture that encourages top-of-the-line purchases, from strollers to high chairs, parenthood now comes with a hefty price tag. It’s pitting a generation of Canadians against considerations that were not so prevalent even twenty years ago. The result is smaller and fewer families among people who might have pictured their lives with more than one child, or any children at all. And while dropping fertility rates aren’t driven by affordability alone, a society’s ability to actualize fertility plans for the children people do want matters. If its current generation doesn’t see a future where they can house, feed, or care for the next one, it’s in trouble—on an economic and existential level.
Cairns and her partner are on the precipice of a choice more Canadians are making later in life—and questioning whether it’s a decision they can afford to make. “I feel a lot of anger boil up about it sometimes,” says Cairns. “It feels as if I’m asking for a lot, but it’s not.”
The study of how and why people choose to have children has a long history, but some academics believe its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s is largely attributed to the proliferation of the pill. As wider access to contraception allowed women more reproductive control over their lives, what would make them actively decide to have a baby? Some researchers have taken a deep interest in this question, and the answers are profoundly telling of the overall state of any given population. Demographic shifts, economics, and even social norms are all part of the picture, says Karen Lawson, head of the University of Saskatchewan’s department of psychology and health studies.
Survey research suggests that the average number of desired children in North America tends to fall between one and two. But “there’s a polarization in people’s ability to actualize their fertility in terms of the timing they want, and in terms of the actual numbers,” says Kate Choi, a sociologist and director of Western University’s Centre for Research and Social Inequality. And the social factors that influence this differ from person to person.
On one hand, some people may have unwanted or mistimed pregnancies because of limited access to contraception. Others might struggle to have the children they do want, at the time they want, because of economic constraints. Canada and other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development have seen fertility rates drop for decades. “Once it starts decreasing, it’s very difficult to reverse the rate as well as the direction of the decline,” says Choi.
Here’s what the decline looks like from an affordability perspective: in 2022, Statistics Canada noted that nearly 40 percent of people between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine felt a child was not financially in the cards for them in the next three years. In 2023, a national Abacus Data and Canadian Real Estate Association survey found that more than half of Canadians aged eighteen to thirty-four who would like to have children have delayed or forgone their plans entirely due to the country’s housing crisis.
Lawson researches the impact that financial constraints have on reproductive decision making. Two years ago, she surveyed 1,000 adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five nationwide, with a near 50/50 split between men and women. Across every income bracket, 37 percent of respondents told her they planned to delay parenthood till at least thirty-five, in part due to perceived financial obstacles. Notably, and perhaps unsurprisingly, while men were more likely to indicate a desire to delay parenthood, women were more likely to mention career interruption as a factor: many indicated they were delaying their plans for children in order to get settled financially first and live for themselves a little. “This suggests two things to me,” says Lawson. “That women still expect to be primarily responsible for child rearing, and that the shift toward more intensive parenting models may be playing a role in delay, especially for women.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, Lawson says. Historically, people had children not to experience parenthood but to grow a family for necessity. “There was a time when the economic benefit of having children—labour potential, caring for elderly parents—far outweighed the costs,” she says. “We have now transitioned to a situation where children have very little economic value for parents, [and] the economic costs associated with parenting, and life, are rising.”
While the reasons behind the long-term drop in fertility are varied—higher rates of education, women’s participation in the workforce, and reproductive rights account for more resources invested in fewer children—declines specifically due to financial constraints have recently come into focus. Don Kerr, a professor in the department of sociology at King’s University College at Western University and former demographer with Statistics Canada, points out that while dips in Canadian fertility rates after the baby boom of the mid-’70s evened out historically, we haven’t yet rebounded from the most recent decline that began in 2008.
I don’t remember considering financial realities before starting a family. I don’t know if I was sheltered or simply delusional—likely a mix of both.
I spoke to more than a dozen families across Canada about their financial experiences in having, and not having, children in the past few years. Transportation, child care, food, and housing—the four horsemen of our country’s cost-of-living crisis—came up as unsurprising obstacles.
The average property price is estimated to hit $713,375 in 2025, almost double what it was ten years ago. Coupled with the fact that Canadian salaries have barely kept up with inflation (and in the case of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the median hourly rate has even been clawed back slightly), it’s not hard to see why homeownership rates were on a steady decline between 2011 and 2021 across the country. Renting isn’t much of a reprieve. Last summer, a CBC analysis of Statistics Canada and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data found that not only had average rent increases across the country outpaced salaries (which, in 2022, averaged at $68,000 nationally), the vacancy rate among units with two bedrooms or more was shockingly low, at 1.7 percent.
But the structural gaps in the systems designed to support parents stood out as the biggest problem. Some parents, for example, described parental leave pay as a pipe dream. Since the program is attached to EI, applicants need to qualify for it the same way a recently unemployed person would. In Canada, parental benefits are typically between 33 and 55 percent of the salary an employee was earning the year prior to their leave. For many people, this caps out at $668 per week. And while some employers provide additional top-ups for specific periods of time, a 2021 survey found that only 33 percent offer these benefits to new parents. This system also excludes a lot of people with the type of contract-based employment that has increasingly become the norm—or anyone who can’t afford to live off half of a wage that barely covers living costs as it is.
Marigold Santos learned after becoming pregnant in early 2021 that, as a self-employed worker, she’d have needed to pay into EI for a year before being able to make a parental leave claim. In 2023, self-employed people comprised about 13 percent of the Canadian workforce, but the proportion of women in this category has been rising since the late ’70s. The majority of them don’t pay into EI for a number of reasons: the benefit applies only to certain types of leaves (for example, you can’t tap into the benefit if your business fails), and once you take a leave, you have to continue paying benefits indefinitely.
Santos and her husband, Yarko, first met a few years earlier; soon after, they decided to move from Montreal to Calgary to be closer to family and start one of their own. As a full-time artist and furniture fabricator respectively, the rhythm of their incomes has long been feast and famine. They saved up throughout Santos’s pregnancy, to take a three-month leave after their son, Mazzy, was born, but even that wasn’t enough. “I didn’t anticipate what my needs would be after the fact,” she says. “You’re not able to work as much, because your body is still healing. I had to be mindful of what I could do. I’d call that a cost as well.”
In my conversations with couples, child care also came up as a constant—and changing—expense. Camilla Wynne, a cookbook author, and Kat Butler, a resident anesthesiologist at the University of Toronto, felt like they’d won the lottery when they secured a daycare spot before their daughter was born in the summer of 2022. It was part time and within walking distance of their home in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto. The three days a week cost them $1,350 a month, which seemed exorbitant when paired with their rent. But the fees dipped when the centre enrolled in the $10-a-day child care program last year, and the couple decided to switch to full-time care, for $917 a month. A diamond find. Then, earlier this summer, the centre informed them they may not be continuing with the program in 2025 and rates would go back up.
These fluctuations are one of the unintended consequences of the federal government’s attempts to make child care cheaper. Daycares across the country have steadily lowered fees since the Liberals rolled out a subsidy to bring rates down to $10 a day by the 2026 fiscal year; last December, Statistics Canada noted that Canadians overall were spending less on child care than they did in 2022. But stagnant wages in early childhood education and restrictive funding models in some provinces have limited child care centres’ ability to increase the number of spots they have—or to participate in the subsidy program at all. In Ontario, for example, daycares had to freeze their rates upon signing up for the first two years of the subsidized program—which left many centres struggling to keep up with operating costs that have risen with inflation.
Wynne and Butler considered their options. They spent a few weeks in Ottawa and wondered about moving back there. “We thought maybe it’ll be easier if we’re around family,” Wynne says. “But my sister and brother-in-law are lawyers: we didn’t see them until the last weekend. Kat’s mom still works six days a week.” The couple considered going into debt to continue their daughter’s enrolment at the Toronto daycare until Butler’s residency was up and their income as a staff doctor could cover the cost. “She loves her daycare,” Wynne says of her daughter, but Wynne is not aware of any places nearby that are part of the subsidy program and have spots available.
I’ve been thinking about a number from household spending data collected from 2014 to 2017, the year my first child was born: $293,000. That’s the average amount, according to Statistics Canada, that a medium-income, two-parent family with two children could expect to spend on each child up until they reach the age of seventeen. Almost 30 percent more if the parents support the child’s post-secondary education. These numbers blew up headlines and AM talk shows across the country when the report was published in 2023.
My household fits neatly into the sample description used by the researchers, but I don’t remember considering these financial realities in a concrete way before starting a family. I also don’t know if I was sheltered or simply delusional—likely a mix of both. I had employment that qualified me for EI, and my husband could afford to move his home office out of our condo—two big advantages that, as a journalist and a musician, made us circumstantially lucky. My first child was also not my first wanted pregnancy; for months, I was too elated and anxious about carrying to term to think about money beyond squirrelling some extra cash into my savings account every month.
But my parents—two accountants who lived through some lean years in their first decade in Canada to make their ideal of suburban parenthood work—did. My father called to check if I’d set up a Registered Education Savings Plan weeks before my first child was even born. My mother, who paused her career in the early ’90s to start a home daycare, in order to watch me and my brother and still earn an income, negotiated a part-time arrangement at her current job to help with our child care. My husband’s parents did the same. It’s a measure of support that underpins our own lives as parents—a gift that made this life possible.
Millennials aren’t forgoing parenthood due to the cost of strollers or a second car. They’re thinking about housing and reliable child care.
By the time we were ready to have a second child (at the height of the lockdown phase of the pandemic, when we were already familiar with the feeling of being cooped up in a small space), my husband and I knew we couldn’t afford a bigger place. We knew then that our kids would be sharing a room, that their childhood may not include a front porch or a backyard—things we grew up with. We knew that the benefit of being close to family and our people was worth far more.
The calculation I think about these days is my own ability to pay this kind of support forward to my kids, should they ever want or need it. Can we afford retirement? If they ever consider parenthood, what kind of a choice will it look like then?
It may sound unproductive to think about hypothetical grandchildren in this context—and that far into the future. But on some level, I think it’s necessary. The biggest financial obstacles millennials and elders among the Gen Z cohort are facing today aren’t going to be solved overnight and will likely require the kind of sustained advocacy that today’s parents may never directly benefit from: housing policy that ensures people can find somewhere to live without spending more than a third of their income; an overhaul of the parental leave pay system; a forward-looking child care plan that trains, pays, and hires enough early childhood educators to meet demand.
Consider that the child care system we have now is the product of more than a century of work. Some of the earliest activism dates back to the 1940s, when a group of Ontario mothers fought to keep wartime day nurseries funded and open even after the federal government felt they were no longer needed. A national child care system was first suggested in a report by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women over fifty years ago; it took Quebec almost thirty years to make a provincial version of it a reality, with its rollout of subsidized $5-a-day child care in 1997.
Some shorter-term policy action may also help ease the pressure as we wait for longer-term changes. Generation Squeeze, a think tank with a lab based out of the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, suggests raising the current EI cap of 55 percent of an employee’s wage to 80 percent. This change would increase income while on parental leave by as much as $24,000 a year. Creating an entirely separate insurance system for parental leave—the way Quebec did in 2006—could take years, but boosting the maximum insurable earnings from the current $63,200 a year to $68,000 would increase incomes at a particularly tight time for parents.
It’s also worth shifting the way today’s parenting culture encourages people to think about and differentiate their needs. The same first-pregnancy anxiety that caused me to push aside any serious financial planning also made me direct my energy—and sometimes money—elsewhere. I spent weeks agonizing over the right stroller, something safe and sturdy that could fit on a bus and didn’t cost $1,000, without once considering that any stroller for sale in Canada, at any price, adheres to the same series of safety regulations. As embarrassing as it feels to admit this now, it’s also not an uncommon experience. In her 2022 book-length essay, “Stroller,” Amanda Parrish Morgan outlines how the tools of caring for young children have transformed over the past few decades into something she calls “consumption as care.” These objects, which signify status and quell the anxieties of early parenthood, are extremely easy to sell. Highly functional and, by nature, meant for public view, the stroller perhaps exemplifies this the most: what began as a Bugaboo product placement in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City has since exploded into a microeconomy of buyer’s guides on prices for prams and joggers ranging anywhere from $100 to $1,500.
This mode of thinking can also obscure very real consumer issues with items that aren’t luxury goods. Given that only about 35 percent of infants are exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, infant formula is a consistent and very real expense. For some families, the $200 (or more) per month isn’t something they’ve factored into their first few months of parenting.
Then there are the rearrangements that don’t end up feeling like compromises—the things one learns to live without but instead realizes they were never really a need to begin with. In interviews, it was reassuring to hear, quite consistently, how the lived experience of parenthood can clarify the difference between genuine need and manufactured desire in those particularly vulnerable first few months. I spoke to a couple in Edmonton who, after a month of admiring pricey hand-carved cribs, opted for a $300 model from Ikea that was just fine. One mother in Hamilton, Ontario, told me she started a WhatsApp group last year with other new moms in the neighbourhood. They swap more than just advice about diaper rash and colic: formula coupons, extra nursing bras, diapers a baby’s outgrown. If the timing lines up for an under-expiry-date car seat, someone can take it. And another mom, a Toronto-based craftsperson and children’s clothing designer, said she buys second-hand anything she doesn’t make for her two children.
Between products and the price of living, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that having children has somehow become a luxury experience. Over nearly ten years of writing about parenting and reproductive justice, I’ve heard many different versions of this idea. What’s become clear since is that the confluence of expense and expectation—the cost of living coupled with how this generation would like to raise their kids—has muddled our understanding of luxury. The research available tells us that millennials who’d otherwise want kids aren’t stalling or forgoing parenthood entirely due to the cost of strollers, or because they can’t afford a second car to drive these future children to hockey practice. Instead, they’re thinking about affordable housing, reliable child care, and sometimes the cost of in vitro fertilization. (A single round of IVF typically costs up to $20,000 in Canada, with multiple rounds often required for success.) None of these things is a luxury.
I can see why a generation weighing its options for parenthood could take such a sentiment to heart. After years of being told that homeownership is a sure way to financial stability, only to see that surety vanish for large segments of the population, why wouldn’t one’s prospects for another life-changing event seem as fraught?
At the time of writing, Cairns and her partner are nearly six months into their apartment hunt. They’ve increased their monthly housing budget by $1,000; since the moving and commuting costs involved in finding a place further outside the city will eat up most potential savings from a lower rent, they’re still looking in Toronto. If they can’t make it work, they’ll move to Vancouver, to stay with Cairns’s mom, who’s offered up her home as a place to carry their hypothetical baby through infancy at least. “We’ll multigenerational-home it and see how it goes,” Cairns says. “I’m grateful that my partner sees the benefits in that and is willing to
do that.”
No, a child isn’t a consumer product; children are human beings, shaped by the environment and acts of care their guardians provide. A child isn’t a luxury, but in 2024, the ability to provide that care, without significant material worry, can feel like one. Should we feel good about that?
