Parents struggling now more than ever to maintain family expenses in the GTA, experts say

Maintaining a family in the GTA is becoming a desperate prospect, as support systems struggle to keep up.

Recent numbers from Statistics Canada have shown that, nationwide, over one million children are being raised in single-parent/guardian households, with the metric only increasing in the last few decades.

As a result, authorities in family aid are concerned about the challenges parents — single or otherwise — are facing, given the rising cost of living in Toronto and its surrounding municipalities.

Institutions like One Parent, an Ontario-based service that supports parents and children in single-parent households, have been working to draw public attention to the need for community programming to be refined to better assist families of all sizes.

“Single-parent families are often expected to do twice the work with half the support,” Shoaib Khan, founder of One Parent, said alongside a recent report. “I watched my mother build a world for us from scratch.”

Data relayed by One Parent, collected on behalf of UNICEF Canada, indicate that 44 per cent of children in single-parent families nationwide live below the poverty line, a stark contrast to the eight percent from dual-income households.

“Unfortunately, when I talk to a lot of the single moms out there, they feel like they have become a statistic,” Khan told INsauga.com. “I try to tell them, it’s good to be a single mother, it’s good to be a single father, raise your children, there should never be a sense to be dependent on anybody.”

Khan oversees numerous incentives at One Parent, all of which focus on financial/employment assistance, mental health supports, and structured counselling for youth from struggling single-parent households.

However, with nearly half of all single-parent families navigating poverty, the urgency for sustainable programming is at an all-time high, especially as StatsCan numbers from today’s National Balance Sheet report stated that household debt across the country is sitting at $3.1 trillion.

For Steve Vanderherberg, VP of community programs at Woodgreen Community Services (operating in Toronto for nearly a century), the urgency for family support overhauls in the GTA needs to be a significant conversation.

“In terms of rate of pay, and the type of work available, on top of the standard for affordability behind primary housing, and food cost, margins are super tight,” Vanderherberg told INsauga.com. “The balance sheet doesn’t even balance in a lot of respects for a lot of people now, and there aren’t immediate solutions for things that keep piling up.”

As a byproduct of stretched resources, authorities like Khan have witnessed working-age teens step up to help pay bills.

Despite this, the GTA is currently grappling with a youth unemployment rate of staggering proportions, making the field of play all the more hostile and youth even more desperate.

“A lot of people are giving up, and unfortunately, I have heard of a lot of suicides recently among young people because they could not find a job,” says Khan.

Khan further indicated that while having all members of the family contribute is admirable, the end goal of programs like One Parent is to help single parents have a stable enough foundation, so that their children can focus on extracurricular activities and schooling, instead of punching a time sheet.

“I didn’t have a normal life, because I had to work,” adds Khan.

For Vanderherberg, as a byproduct of real-time distress endured by all members of struggling families, he has ensured that Woodgreen reinvent its financial assistance strategies and mentorship programs.

Specifically, by future-proofing households currently experiencing financial free-fall.

“To live and work in [Toronto], we have to expand our strategy when it comes to workforce training by looking more at pathways that get people into work that has great forecasts for labour needs. So if there is a field that shows for the next 10 years there will be work, we focus on that,” says Vanderherberg.

Khan also applies a similar approach to helping single parents/guardians seek work in markets that are specifically trending, by utilizing a network of GTA assistance platforms such as The United Way and The Neighbourhood Group.

Despite a united front among support programs, Vanderherberg believes that in the GTA, progress won’t be made until there is an equally unanimous approach from the province and the federal government to fund programs like theirs.

“I mean, my colleagues and I have had, don’t know how many meetings with politicians over the last two weeks, and I want to emphasize that point,” says Vanderherberg.

On top of engaging politicians, the only real way to create lasting change, according to Vanderherberg, is to create an environment where people don’t need to rely as heavily on services like his at all. The throughline to this, however, is to court the ear and wallets of employers in the GTA, a prospect that, to at least Vanderherberg, comes with its own hurdles.

“It’s a very difficult thing, and I’m not naive to that. But, I do think there has to be a real importance for them, as they are a piece of making this work… they have to be a part of helping people thrive when affordability becomes this challenging.”