Number of families continues to slide

The total number of families in the country continued to deplete in 2018, posting a decline of 2,800 in 2017, according to the Statistics Finland.

There were 1,469,000 families in Finland at the end of 2018. The contraction is almost at the same level as the annual growth rate of the number of families a couple of years ago.

Sixty-four per cent of the families were married couples. The number of families formed by opposite-sex married couples and children fell by 7,960 from that in the previous year. The number of families formed by cohabiting couples and children, in turn, decreased by some 600 families year on year.

Same-sex cohabiting couples are not formed in family statistics, but only cohabiting couples of opposite sexes are taken into consideration.

In contrast, the number of families formed by childless cohabiting couples increased by 2,530 in 2018 and that of opposite-sex married couples by 1,900. The number of one-parent families increased slightly – that of families formed by a mother and children by 428 and that of a father and children by 676.

The number of same-sex cohabiting couples increased by 321, while the number of registered couples decreased by 192. The development is a natural continuum of the amendment to the Marriage Act. The number of registered couples in 2018 was 1,282, or 192 lower than one year previously.

There were 1,980 families of same-sex married couples (0.1%). Of them, 66 per cent were families of female couples. Twenty-three per cent of such families were made of cohabiting couples and 13 per cent of one-parent families, which is the same as in the previous year. In 2018, there were 1,191,297 persons living alone, which is 28,989 more than in 2017.

The average size of a family in 2018 was 2.75 members. As early as in 1990, the average size of a family was three persons. Seventy-three per cent of the population, or 4,034,000 persons, in 1990 belonged to a family, which was 21,503 fewer than in the year before. The share of persons belonging to a family has since been falling steadily. In 1990, their share of the population was 82 per cent.

In 1990, the total number of families with children was 562,000. The number had declined by 4,300 from that in the year before. The decrease is bigger than that in 2018 and clearly bigger than on average in a good decade, when the annual decrease has been around 2,000.

At the end of 2018, there were 50,700 reconstituted families. The number of reconstituted families went down by 598 from the previous year. The share of reconstituted families in families with underage children has remained at nine per cent since 2004.