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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

Recent debates about social inequality have seen scholars across the ideological spectrum revive past arguments about family breakdown, a “flight from marriage” and the roles of social class, social capital and state support for child development. Elevated levels of union dissolution mean that children are at higher risk of experiencing the separation of their parents, an event still seen as potentially harmful, despite reforms made to family law. We report research on recent birth cohorts of Canadian children born to a co-resident couple. Analysis of successive cohorts of 0-1 year olds from all eight data sweeps of Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth shows that children experience greater risk of parental separation in Quebec and that is linked with its higher prevalence of children born to “conjoints de fait” (common law unions) the historical context being a collapse of Catholicism and revisions of the Civil Code in recent decades. Proportional hazards regressions and other techniques show that children’s higher risk of experiencing parental separation is also correlated with having parents with no more than high school graduation, being born to mothers younger than their mid-twenties, having fewer siblings, living in lower income households that rent rather than own, and to being of Aboriginal or African Canadian origin while lower risk of parental separation goes with Asian ancestral origin and with having at least some religious identification. Children whose reporting parent scored higher on the CES-D scale of depression were at greater risk of subsequent parental breakup.