Three Kids Are the New Status Symbol

Has having three kids become a status symbol in Canada?

In this episode of DemograFix, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt explore why having three children has become a luxury for many middle-class Canadian families. From the cost of family-sized housing to childcare, career sacrifices, transportation, and the changing expectations placed on parents, they break down why so many families stop at two, even when they wanted more.

The conversation also looks at Canadian and international research on fertility, Quebec's childcare experiment, why family-sized homes have almost disappeared from our cities, and what governments would actually need to change if they want Canadians to have the families they hope for.

If you've ever wondered why three kids now feels like a status symbol, this episode explains the economics behind it.

Topics covered:

• Why Canada's fertility rate has reached record lows
• Is a third child becoming a luxury good?
• How housing shortages shape family size
• Why family-sized homes are disappearing
• The hidden career costs of having children
• Does affordable childcare actually increase birth rates?
• Why cities are losing young families
• What policies could make raising larger families affordable again

Chapters:

00:00 Why 3 Kids Are Becoming a Rich Person's Luxury

00:58 When Families Become Status Symbols

03:03 The Housing Crisis is Eliminating the Third Child

05:09 Canada Stopped Building Family Homes

06:28 The Big Childcare Problem

07:55 Does Cheap Childcare Actually Boost Birth Rates?

12:15 The Real Cost of a Third Baby

15:07 Families Are Being Forced Out of Cities

17:20 How Canada Could Make Three Kids Affordable Again

Research/links:

More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility | Institute for Family Studies 

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-crowding-fewer-babies-the-effects-of-housing-density-on-fertility

The ultimate status symbol? A big family

https://www.ft.com/content/a4025e93-7552-4f8f-8ce2-e785a7d950a4?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Opinion | Three Kids? You Showoffs. - The Washington Post 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2008/04/06/three-kids-you-showoffs/6b7952ed-4547-4f9b-ae9b-cd9d2f1d8aa0/

Why are some families with children leaving the inner city and other staying? 

https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/njus.2.1.2

Home Alone | Cardus 

https://www.cardus.ca/research/family/reports/home-alone/

Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux

Produced by Meredith Martin

Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've started noticing something at my kids' school. When I'm at pickup or a birthday party or just talking to other parents in the neighborhood, I almost never meet a family with three kids. Occasionally it happens, and I like I remember them because it's notable enough. And the rare time when I do meet a family with three kids, my first thought is, oh, this is a wealthy family. Either they got into the housing market early and they built their wealth there, or they've got some serious family wealth or maybe massive incomes. Canada's fertility rate has hit a record low last year, entering ultra-low territory. And some of that is people not having any kids, but for the ones who do, two seems to be the maximum most middle class families will have. And I suspect many of these families are people who did the math and got to the same place most middle-class urban families are getting to right now, which is a third kid would require things that we just can't easily afford: space, time, and money. Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

When things are unaffordable, they become a status symbol. You know, think of someone who drives a very high-end luxury car. You know, they're signaling to the world, or at least they're attempting to, that they have the resources to afford such a lifestyle. And we're seeing the same thing play out with families with three or more children. You know, there's a cohort of high-income, high-wealth families. Think of one percenters that are having three or four or five kids as a status symbol, you know, let alone millionaires, billionaires, and you know, trillionaires with uh 37 kids, uh, some of which have names that look like you know, cat stepped on the keyboard. But this is a real phenomenon, and we've seen that in the data that uh billionaires have, you know, far more kids than the rest of us. And you know, if we look in the media about this kind of three kids as a luxury status symbol, there's a lot of articles out of the US and the UK. For example, the Financial Times in the UK ran a piece on it last summer that went absolutely viral. And this observation as of three kids as a luxury status symbol goes back to at least 2008, uh, when the Washington Post ran a piece on it. But for some reason, we haven't seen a lot of this discussion play out in the media in Canada, though I do have friends that bring it up from time to time. So it's at least permeated, you know, the Canadian consciousness, even if we haven't seen a lot of media discussion about it.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah, even if it's not in the media yet, I think that there's a lot of people who do genuinely think that that is a that is a thing that's actually happening in Canada just because of the cost of living. Like you need a lot of money to be able to raise three or more kids.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I often hear this, you know, we'll be talking about friends of ours, gossips that uh that we are who are you know younger and like lawyers and doctors, and you know, oftentimes we'll hear like, oh, well, they must be doing well because they've, you know, they they just had their their fourth kid, and I can only imagine what that costs. So, you know, if large families have become this status symbol because they're so unaffordable, that raises the obvious question of what has made having three or more children unaffordable. Now, I'm a housing guy, so housing is the obvious answer. You know, if you have three or more kids, you're gonna want a home that has at least three bedrooms and more likely to have four or five. And those are incredibly expensive, uh, particularly in our cities, uh, what I like to call here in Canada, places with NHL teams. Uh, you know, unsurprisingly, there's data from the Institute for Family Studies that shows that women in one or two bedroom homes have much lower fertility rates than women in three or more bedroom homes. So that shows that if you have the space, you're probably more likely to have kids.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

And just based on national occupancy standards, a maximum of two people should share a bedroom, even if they're the same sex. So even if you end up like with three girls, for example, they couldn't all share a room. Otherwise, you'd be considered underhoused. So you need to have at least a three-bedroom when accounting for the parents' room. And of course, like that's not a lot, but it is a guideline that determines what is considered appropriate housing in Canada. And I do suspect that many people agree with those standards, because like a lot of people think you should have at least two bedrooms for three kids. I think that most people, if you if you ask them what they would like to have to have for three kids, it would be at minimum two bedrooms, if not three.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, I I could say that knowing all uh some families with three boys, I can't imagine all three boys in the same room.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Chaos.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

The chaos, and and quite frankly, the smell I think would would not be uh would not be uh fantastic. And this this three-bedroom thing is is really important that there's data and studies out of the US that shows when a woman had three or more bedrooms available to her, it didn't actually make that much of a difference or really any statistical difference what type of house it was. You know, you could be talking high-rise, townhome, what have you. It was actually the number of bedrooms that made a bigger difference than the form of the house. But of course, in Canada, like we don't really have three-bedroom apartments, particularly in high-rises. So if you need something that's family-sized, you're probably looking at single-detached, semi-detached townhomes, maybe some older low-rise apartments, but you're probably needing that kind of ground-oriented housing.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

And three-bedroom family units are exactly what developers in Canada have stopped building. They're just more expensive to build with their current building codes. And politicians have been treating a studio and a three-bedroom as interchangeable units for the purpose of housing supply. So they can say, yay, we are hitting our target. We're getting this many units on the market. But like, there's a big difference between a studio apartment and a three-bedroom home, of course. They're not at all the same. And by the national occupancy standard, over 800,000 Canadian families are living in unsuitably small housing. And of course, Toronto is near the top of the list of places where that's happening.

unknown 5:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

So we have these uh politicians uh that represent our cities, you know, both uh urban areas and suburban areas that have this unit as a unit mindset. And, you know, what they fail to recognize is that a high-rise apartment unit, which is incredibly useful, but it houses on average half as many people as a full-size home. And it's not uh it's not as flexible. You know, there's certain family types, like you can fit six single people in a uh single-detach home, but you can't, you know, fit a six-person family in a uh in a high-rise unit. So the types of units that that we build are important, and our politicians tend not to make that distinction. So you've got the housing side of it, but you've also got the child care side of it. And when I use child care, I want to use this as broadly as possible. So I'm I'm thinking of uh stay-at-home parents, daycares, full-time nannies, that kind of thing. The full-time nannies piece is important. It's, I think, how a lot of these very high-income families are able to have three or four kids, that it allows both parents to continue working. It almost adds like a third parent to the household and ensures that uh kids are looked after.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

For full-time care, the other option is, of course, to have one parent stay home, but that's a practical impossibility for the middle class or even for the upper middle class. If they want to have a decent size home in an urban area on a single income, it's pretty much impossible to do that nowadays. And there may have been a time when it was possible, but those days are over. And that's of course because of housing prices again. Both people need to work full time to afford these prices. And this is a big change from the past where houses could be purchased with one income or one and a half incomes. Someone could work part-time, giving them time to take care of the household and the kids, especially like you know, school finishes a lot earlier than most jobs finish. So they'd be able to take the kids home and take care of them then.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah, absolutely. So, like, let's review here you're a middle-class family in an urban or suburban area. You want to have three or four kids, but a full-time nanny is out, you just can't afford it. Being a stay-at-home parent is out that's no longer really feasible because of the price of housing, that really leaves only daycare is the only plausible option.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

And while that's helpful, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. There's a study that looked at how the introduction of low-cost childcare impacted family sizes in Quebec. And I don't know how much we can draw from this to compare it to the introduction of the $10 a day program across the country because the economics are quite different, mostly because of housing. But here's what they found. For women in their early 20s, mostly before they had kids, subsidized childcare raised the odds of having a first or second child without hurting employment. But for women in their early 30s, the effect was the opposite. The odds of a second or third child went down. And so the theory that the researchers had was that affordable childcare made returning to work easier. And once you're earning it again, stepping away for another baby, it just costs so much money.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

So, Kara, I love it when you go full econ 101, even though you didn't use the term, you know, that you were talking about opportunity costs there. And there is this massive opportunity cost for women. There's an impact to career progression, connections, mispromotions, etc. So, you know, it's not, you know, having more daycare, more attainable daycare is fantastic, but it's not a panacea here.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Yeah, no matter how you look at it, like if you're taking time off work, there is going to be an impact, even if your Mat Leaf policies are pretty good. And a woman in the early 30s, like, she's been working for 10 years, she's built up seniority and a salary. So the actual financial cost of leaving that career for a third parental leave is much higher than it was the first time. You know, the later on in your career, the more money you're leaving on the table, the more options of like, as you said, promotions, uh, things like that. Like it's it's very difficult to catch up when you've been taking so much time off. Cheaper daycare helps people get back to work faster. But once that woman's back at work, another baby means like starting that cock all again with the time off and then coming back to work and all that money that you've lost during that time off and everything else that comes with it. It's just, it's it's it's a big sacrifice that I think a lot of women, especially after you've done it one time, realize what a sacrifice it is.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Now, there's a bit of a caveat here when we look at the uh Quebec experience of the 1990s of introducing cheap childcare, because that wasn't the only policy they did. So it doesn't make a for a really good natural experiment because they simultaneously canceled a cash baby bonus that had existed since the late 80s, and that bonus was specifically weighted towards larger families. So before that cancellation, having a third child or or a fourth child, you know, go up the right ladder was worth about $8,000 paid out over five years. That program was canceled when childcare was introduced. So it's hard to know, you know, how much of the Quebec experience was due to the introduction of childcare versus how much was the removal of that program. So we have to be a little bit careful. And researchers have noted that it's hard to kind of disentangle those two effects when looking at the overall effect of the Quebec reforms in the 1990s.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

But what I think is actually the more important point for today's viewer in Toronto or Vancouver or Ottawa, that study is measuring the effects of a policy introduced when housing costs a fraction of what it does now. So my hunch, and I just want to be clear, this is me guessing, it's not a finding, but I would guess that the Quebec style program does more for fertility today than it did in 1997 because the overall cost of living context is just so much more brutal. Like I always say I would not have had a second kid if childcare was still $2,000 a month or more, because like the math didn't math. I couldn't figure out how to make it work in my budget. There was just no way to make it possible.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Yeah, absolutely. And that's really important to note because this comes up a lot in policy work where I'll get questions like, okay, if we raise or lower development charges, let's say, like how much of that is pass along to the end consumer? And a lot of times it depends, right? It depends on the kind of underlying uh market conditions and so on. And I think the same thing applies here that you know, the Quebec experience was in a very, very different real estate market. So, you know, it would be fair to expect some differences of porting over a policy from the 1990s in one economic circumstance that if you bring it over to you know the GTA in 2026, the impact may be different. Now it could be better, but the impact's likely to be different because of a different housing context.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

So child care policy might help, particularly for getting to a first or second child at an earlier part of your life, which that gives you more time biologically to have a third kid if you want, because there's a lot of people who don't start having kids till their mid-30s. And then it's like, you got to move quick if you want a third kid. But there's also just so much working against you between the housing costs, the opportunity costs, and the career timing all just kind of stacking up at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, absolutely. And I also have to think that the expectations we play saw on parents plays a big role here. So this isn't the 1970s or 1980s where latch key kids were the norm. It wasn't out of the ordinary for a kid in grade three to wear like a house key on a shoelace around their neck, you know, let themselves into the house after school, pour themselves a bowl of cereal, and watch cartoons. You know, not only is that not normal anymore, I think in many cases is it's not even legal anymore. You can't expect kids uh to do that. So the context of raising children has changed. Plus, there's a growing expectation that kids be enrolled in hundreds of increasingly expensive opportunities. You know, having one child play hockey is outrageously expensive. Having three or four seems downright impossible.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Yeah, it's not just expensive, but it's also time consuming. Like, there's a big logistical challenge of trying to get your kids, especially if you have multiple kids, to all their practices on time. And like, and if you want to have any sense of self as a parent, you probably want to have your own activities and hobbies too. So, like trying to work that all together, it's just like impossible when you have more people to coordinate with. Interestingly, there's data showing women spend more time engaging actively with their kids than they did in the past, which I thought was pretty surprising because you know, women's participation in the workforce is obviously much higher today than it was when Mike was eating his fruit loops and playing Atari.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Now, to be fair, that was just last week. But in all seriousness, I imagine uh parents are having much higher quality time with their kids than they did in the past.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I guess I can see how when you're working all day, like you want to be very focused on actively playing with their kids than you know, when you have all day to play with them. And this is something I often tell moms who I know when they're dreading the end of their MAT leave, there's like this angst about going back to work because you're like, I feel so bad, I'm gonna get so much less time with my baby. And what I always tell them is that the quantity of time you spend with your baby decreases when you send them to daycare and when you go back to work. But the quality goes up because it's easier to like really enjoy that time together when you know it's limited. You don't have any of that, like, oh my gosh, we have to just get through the day. How long until the next nap? And that's something that happens when you're off with them. So you really spend a lot more time actively enjoying playing with them.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Yeah, and also those kids are now old enough to learn how to play Atari.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah, I don't know if a one-year-old can, although I I suspect you did probably at that age. Anyhow, it's not just the time cost. You also have to cart all those kids around to sports, to school, to daycare. You've got to coordinate with your partner about who's gonna take which kid, how you're gonna get there, figure out how to coordinate three different schedules. I think about three kids and I think about the transportation side of it. And like that's most people's second biggest expense after housing. It isn't cheap at all to get kids around. Like SUVs and vans are expensive, which I guess you probably need because you know, three kids in the car seats that they need right these days. Like there are ones that you could do three kids in a sedan, but they're tight. You need a specialized cargo bike if you're biking, and transit is like it's tough to wrangle multiple kids on transit, though at least most cities in Canada do have free transit for kids. So that does help. Of course, it doesn't help you if you had to drive until you qualified to a place that doesn't have transit.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

Yeah, that coordination is huge. You know, when you've got two kids and two parents, you could play man-to-man defense. You know, I've got him, you've got her, kind of thing. But when the kids outnumber the parents, it's like killing a penalty in hockey or being a man down in soccer, you have to transition to zone coverage, and that can be absolutely tricky.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So when you add it all together, the numbers are really brutal for families in urban areas. If a family's doing the math and maybe they're in a two-bedroom in Toronto or Ottawa or Vancouver, and they want a third kid and they're looking at, we don't have the bedroom, we can't afford to buy the bedroom here. And even if we cleared that housing hurdle, one of us is probably stepping back significantly at work for the next five years. So what happens? They're gonna move out of the city.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Yeah, and we see a lot of that in the Canadian migration data with large numbers of children under the age of five moving out of the GTA, Metro Vancouver, Montreal, and moving to other parts of the country.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Yeah, and that happens not just in Canada. There's a researcher who looked at this in Oslo a couple years ago where he surveyed nearly 3,000 families in Inner Oslo, both ones who'd left and those who had stayed. And he found about 70% of children born in Inner Oslo leave before school age. And the single strongest predictor of which families left was wanting a separate bedroom for each child.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Now, it's always been the case that you get more in suburbs than in cities, but if you want to retain at least some of those families, cities need to legalize building family-sized housing. And that could be at the edge of the town, infill, or what have you, but you've got to be able to build those three, four, five bedroom units.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

So, what does this actually require to solve it policy-wise?

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Well, the housing piece is the most concrete, that three, four, five-bedroom family-sized units. They need to exist in cities at prices that a dual-income professional family can access, you know, not just somebody in the top five, one, zero point one percent. And as a start, that means the planning and zoning system has to stop treating all residential units as equivalent. A three-bedroom unit that houses a family five serves a fundamentally different purpose than a one-bedroom unit. Our housing policy needs to reflect that. And for the last 20 years, we've had very kind of anti-family uh zoning policy in large parts of the country.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Let's acknowledge that right now, for the most part, having a third kid in Canada, especially in a city, is a luxury. And it shouldn't be. And people can lower their standards to make it work, but as always, when it comes to birth rates, women don't have to have kids. And if the situation doesn't exist to make it desirable, it will not happen.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Yeah, and it really does come down to affordability. We see this in the data that there's this linear relationship between income and birth rates. And the lowest birth rates are in fact among the poorest Canadians because of that relationship. So, you know, we might, you know, get this feedback and go, well, you know, low-income people uh have lots of kids. Why can't the middle class? But that's actually simply not true in Canada. Uh, low-income families tend to not have very many kids at all. So it really comes down to this uh affordability piece across the board that affects both the middle class and lower income Canadians.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

And if you have any thoughts or questions about the relative merits of Fruit Loops versus cinnamon toast crunch, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

And we'll see you next time.