The squeeze on earnings, housing, and mental health doesn’t just delay milestones like homeownership. It’s also postponing family life.

Millennials and Gen Z are marrying later, and having fewer children than generations before them. Fertility rates across Canada are down. In 2008, the national fertility rate was 1.68 births per woman. By 2023, it had dropped to just 1.33—the lowest level ever recorded. The reasons aren’t mysterious. Young adults still want to become parents. But they face massive economic and logistical barriers. Child care—despite welcome new public investments—remains in short supply. Parental leave in Canada is better than in the U.S., but it’s still unavailable to about a third of parents, and those who do qualify often take a big income hit.

Perhaps most important: high housing costs make it difficult to afford space for children. Closets don’t make good bedrooms. It’s hard to rig a pulley system above your dining table to lift a diaper-changing station. And compared to sending kids out to play in a yard or on a quiet street, handing them a balcony key feels unsafe and impractical.

A recent survey by Statistics Canada found that nearly one in four Canadian adults under age 40 had fewer children than they wanted, citing cost of living as the main barrier. Housing affordability topped the list of concerns. When raising a family feels financially impossible, people delay.

As a result, the average age of mothers at childbirth has been climbing steadily since the mid-1970s: from 26.7 years in 1976 to 31.8 in 2024. It’s no coincidence that British Columbia has the highest average age of childbirth of any province – close to 33 years. We were the first region to lose control of housing prices, and we still suffer the biggest mismatch between earnings and home values. So it makes sense that people delay parenthood longer here than anywhere else in the country.

This delay has knock-on effects. The total rate of Caesarean sections is on the rise in the country—a medical response, in part, to the more complex pregnancies that come with advanced maternal age. So a basic socioeconomic problem—the high cost of raising a family—gets medicalized.