Families of married couple, children on wane

Seventy-two per cent of the population, or 3,997,063 persons, belonged to a family, which is 16,881 fewer than in the year before, according to Statistics Finland.

The share of persons belonging to a family has been decreasing steadily. In 1990, the respective share was 82 per cent of the population. The average size of families has also fallen from three persons in 1990 to 2.72 persons in 2020.

Examined by family type, 63 per cent of all families were families of married couples. In 2020, the number of families consisting of an opposite-sex married couple and children decreased by 8,966 families from the previous year, which is more than in the past few years.

In turn, the number of opposite-sex married couples without children grew by 2,337.

Twenty-four per cent of families in 2020 were families of cohabiting couples. The number of families consisting cohabiting couple with children grew by 626 from the year before and the number of families without children grew by 6,128.

The number of one-parent families decreased by 81 families. Although the number of families formed by a mother and children decreased by 342, the number of families of a father and children increased by 261. However, the share of one-parent families has remained at 13 per cent.

The number of same-sex married couples increased by 336, while the number of registered couples decreased by 95.

The development is a natural continuum of the amendment to the Marriage Act that entered into force at the beginning of March 2017, as a result of which part of registered partners have changed their partnership into marriage and new registered partnerships can no longer be formed.

There were 1,059 families of registered couples and 2,654 families of same-sex married couples. Of them, 62 per cent were families of female couples.