For many Canadians, the choice to become self-employed has less to do with entrepreneurial ambition than with the circumstances of their household.
In my recent study tracking Canadians through marriage, divorce, childbirth and widowhood, I found that major family transitions can make self-employment feel either more feasible or entirely out of reach, depending on who in the household absorbs caregiving and who anchors the income.
Self-employment is a significant feature of Canada’s labour market. Statistics Canada reported 2.7 million self-employed workers in March 2025, representing 13.1 per cent of all workers. They can include independent contractors, tradespeople, consultants and freelancers — a diverse group spanning nearly every sector of the economy.
But career decisions rarely happen in isolation. They are shaped by caregiving pressures. Balancing work and child care has also become increasingly difficult for many households.
Although Canada provides parental leave protections and has expanded child-care support in recent years, a 2025 Statistics Canada survey found that half of parents using child care said they had difficulty finding it.
Self-employment, in particular, is closely intertwined with these household constraints: caregiving demands, income uncertainty and the gaps in social protection that employed workers may take for granted.
How family changes reshape work choices
Major family transitions can reshape income roles, caregiving demands and a household’s capacity to absorb financial risk. Marriage, childbirth, divorce and widowhood can each alter who earns, who provides care and how much volatility a household can tolerate.
Marriage often means combining incomes and sharing daily responsibilities. Parenthood can intensify caregiving demands and reduce flexibility around work schedules. Divorce and widowhood may remove financial or practical supports that households previously relied upon.
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These family transitions can reorganize how households allocate time, manage risk and mobilize resources across linked lives. They also do not affect everyone equally. The same life event can produce very different employment responses depending on who absorbs caregiving demands and whose earnings are expected to anchor household stability.
To examine this in practice, I used data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults — a national Statistics Canada survey that tracks lives over time — between 2012 and 2020. I tracked how entry into self-employment changed as individuals experienced each of these transitions.
Marriage and the buffering effect
One of the clearest patterns I found involved marriage. Newly married individuals were generally more likely to move into self-employment, but the increase was not evenly distributed across households. The strongest rise appeared among women in secondary-earning roles within couples.
These findings suggest that marriage can expand household-level financial buffering. Pooling earnings and sharing household responsibilities may reduce exposure to short-term income volatility, making uncertain work arrangements more manageable for some households.
But marriage also affects whose labour is treated as adjustable and whose earnings are expected to anchor household stability. This helps explain why the same life transition can produce such different responses across households.
Parenthood and self-employment
Childbirth revealed a more complicated pattern. Parenthood increases caregiving demands, compresses available time and raises household financial dependency. Under these conditions, self-employment can appear attractive because it offers greater control over schedules.
At the same time, self-employment involves irregular income, administrative demands and financial uncertainty. My study found that mothers who were primary earners were less likely to move into self-employment after childbirth. Fathers with greater caregiving responsibilities showed a similar pattern.
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In both cases, intensified caregiving combined with greater financial pressure appeared to reduce the feasibility of entering uncertain work arrangements like self-employment.
When marriage and childbirth occurred in close succession, however, a different dynamic emerged. Individuals who experienced both transitions within the same period were more likely to move into self-employment than those experiencing either transition alone.
This compressed window of change created conditions in which households had less opportunity to reorganize work and caregiving, and in which self-employment may have offered the most flexible path forward.
Divorce and widowhood
Divorce and widowhood showed how the loss of household support can affect movement into self-employment.
Divorce dissolves household pooling and reorganizes previously shared arrangements for income, time and caregiving into more individualized obligations. This can reduce the ability to tolerate the income volatility that comes with self-employment.
Widowhood showed a similar effect. It removes the relational arrangement through which partners jointly co-ordinate income generation, household production and day-to-day support, and I found it was associated with lower movement into self-employment.
In both cases, it is the loss of the household as a unit of shared risk that shapes what kinds of work feel possible.
Self-employment as a household story
Family transitions rarely happen in isolation. People often marry, become parents and reorganize work and care responsibilities within relatively short periods, and those overlapping changes accumulate in ways that shape what kinds of work feel possible.
Self-employment entry is a household-level outcome, shaped by how families reallocate time, resources and responsibilities after major life transitions. The same event redistributes constraints and opportunities differently depending on who carries what responsibilities within a household.
Many decisions to work for oneself do not emerge from personal ambition alone. They also emerge from households trying to reorganize work, care and financial responsibilities after major life changes.
The circumstances that make self-employment realistic for some people place it beyond reach for others. Understanding that may help explain not only who enters self-employment, but why the opportunity looks so different depending on where you stand in a household.
