Most Canadian children in some type of day care.

OTTAWA -- More than half of Canadian children were in child care by 2000/01 with a quarter of them in daycare centres, indicating a significant increase in the use of some sort of child care in the last six years as well as a significant increase in the use of daycare centres and of child care provided by a relative says a recently released report by Statistics Canada.

Basing its report on 1994/95 and 2000/01 data collected by the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth on children aged six months to five years, the agency found the use of child care increased for all children within the age group regardless of the children's background, including children aged one to five years of age, children of single or two-parent families, children from lower or higher income households, and children living in rural or urban communities.

As well, in 2000/01 children in the age group were more likely to live in a two-parent household where both parents worked or studied than they did six years ago, and children in the age group were less likely to live in a single-parent household where the parent neither worked nor studied.

For children living in single-parent families, where the parent studied or worked, 85 per cent of them attended some sort of child care in 2000/01 as opposed to 78 per cent of them six years earlier, while 73 per cent of children of two-parent families, where the parents worked or studied, were in child care in 2000/01 as opposed to 66 per cent in 1994/95.

The use of child care increased across all provinces with children in Quebec having the highest rate of attending a daycare, instead of attending someone else's home for care, while Saskatchewan had the lowest rate of attendance at daycares.

Although the overall time that children spent in child care changed little during the six-year period between 1994/95 and 2000/01 with the average time being 27 hours per week, those times varied across the provinces. In Quebec children spent an average 30.6 hours per week in care, which is an increase from 28.5 hours per week six years ago, while in British Columbia children were still below the national average in time spent in child care for both time periods with them spending 22.3 hours per week in care for 2000/01. Children in the Atlantic provinces spent from 26.7 to 31.5 hours per week in care in 2000/01.