Analysis: leaving home is a big step in becoming an adult, but the factors influencing when a young adult leaves home are many and varied
Leaving home is considered a milestone in our transition from childhood to adulthood. It's a step in our journey towards independence that’s being increasingly delayed by competing challenges faced by young people. We talk about Generation Rent, the Boomerang Generation and Generation Stuck at Home.
Soaring house prices and rents, combined with the rising cost of living, has seen young people forced to stay or return to living at home with parents or in insecure rental accommodation, unable to save for a mortgage or even afford one. This impacts on wellbeing, mental health and where their life goes.
Young people in the European Union left their parental household at the age of 26.5 years on average in 2021, based on the latest figures from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). But as with all averages, this hides disparities and variations.
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The highest average ages were recorded in Portugal (33.6 years), Croatia (33.3 years), Slovakia (30.9 years), Greece (30.7 years) and Bulgaria (30.3 years), all over 30 years old. By contrast, Sweden (19.0 years), Finland (21.2 years), Denmark (21.3 years) and Estonia (22.7 years) recorded the lowest average ages, all under 23 years old.
Recent years have seen an upward trend in the age at which people leave home, in part due to Covid-19. But like the chicken and egg, disentangling the different factors that influence when a young adult leaves home is very difficult, says Dr. Yekaterina Chzhen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at TCD and an Irish Research Council awardee. There are three broad factors that influence a person's transition to adulthood via independent living; institutions (labour and housing market), public policies (the welfare state and provision of social housing) and cultural.
CSO statistics show the average age of first time mothers in 2021 was 31.6 years, up 0.2 years from 2020. The average age of people getting married in 2021 was 38.2. This translates into people leaving home later, says Chzhen. "Living with a partner and maybe having children is something people do after they move out of home, but at the same time this is also the reason to actually move out of home in the first place."
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In most northern and western European countries, young people left their parental home in their early to mid-twenties on average, while the average age was in the late twenties or early thirties in southern and eastern countries. Ireland is one of the outliers to that trend, with young people leaving home at 27.9 years of age on average, behaving more like southern and eastern European countries than immediate neighbours.
"To the extent that it is difficult for young people to afford living on their own and to find their own affordable housing it is not surprising that they are leaving their parental homes later [in Ireland]." The unemployment rate in Ireland is at 4.3% right now, which is what economists call 'full employment', though full employment does not necessarily mean good employment. The youth unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 is at 12.4%, meaning one in eight is unemployed.
"At the moment it appears that the unemployment rate is quite low so there are jobs out there but people can't afford to live away from home. The labour market and the housing market sometimes move in the same direction, but sometimes in opposite directions. So at the moment it looks like maybe the negative effects of the housing market dominate the positive effects of the labor market," says Chzhen. This is consistent with findings from a CSO pulse survey during Covid of people of all ages living with a parent. Eight in ten (82%) people surveyed said the reason they lived with a parent(s) was a little bit or mostly to do with finances.
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In Ireland, social housing is not easy to access for young people, so they face the choice of rental accommodation — at a soaring cost — or living at home with their parents. Social housing is also not as widely available as it is in some other countries, like Germany, says Chzhen. "Within the public policy dimensions, there would be the generosity and conditionality of unemployment benefits and various income support benefits that could top up low wages. So everything centres on the question of can a young person afford to live on their own."
"To the extent that we now know based on the CSO statistics that the vast majority of people who still live with their parents are doing it for financial reasons, you can infer from that, that it has to do both with the housing market and the cost of living crisis, which is a little bit more recent, and the fact that unless you have a well paid job, you're not likely to be able to rely on income support benefits or affordable social housing."
"It's all very wrapped up, this moving out of home, with what's expected at this life stage in general," says Dr Aisling O'Donnell, Lecturer in Psychology at UL. "When you look at the psychological effect, which may go beyond the effect on mental health, we've actually got to disentangle potentially not having left home or having left and then gone back, with what's happening then anyway."
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"In developmental terms, the models we used to have in psychology for stages of life were developed originally around the mid-20th century. They would have had adolescence and then you were straight into what's called 'early adulthood’, lasting from 18 years to 40 or 45 years. But since about the turn of this century there's recognition, a little bit controversial, but recognition of a whole new life stage called ‘emerging adulthood’.
"Emerging adulthood is meant to last from about 18 to 29 years [of age]. The reason it's a little contentious is it's not seen as a universal life stage, it's particular to certain types of societies, modern developed industrial, or post-industrial societies. The transition to adulthood used to be marked by milestones like leaving home, leaving school, getting a stable job, marriage, parenthood. It was all very prescribed and that's not the case anymore." The milestones that used to signal the beginning of adulthood don’t typically happen until we’re in our 30s now.
"A lot of the reason behind this type of thing is likely to be financial, so this emerging adulthood phase might be forced for at least some people, who are being forced to stay in the family home because they can't afford to move out, or can't afford to both move out and save for your own home. That also can lead to a feeling of wandering, not quite having achieved adulthood. This stage is seen as a pretty normal thing, it's a very unstable period of life, but it has its own mental health implications."
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"Not having moved out of home yet, because you've never left, is called ‘failure to launch’ which sounds pretty harsh. If you've returned to the family home, you’re referred to as ‘boomerang children’, which is also pretty harsh," says O’Donnell. There are five distinct features to ‘emerging adulthood’ and each can be affected by living at home.
Emerging adulthood is the age of identity explorations; the age of instability; the self-focused age; the age of feeling in-between; and the age of possibilities. The transition to adulthood is now considered to be marked by three key characteristics instead of the traditional milestones and those are; accepting responsibility for yourself; making independent decisions; and assuming financial independence, says O’Donnell. All of which can also be affected by living at home.
"Identity exploration is about how we’re exploring through our 20s, what's going to be right for us in love relationships, work and ideology. Exploration of your own identity was usually thought to happen in adolescence but now we recognise that this is happening even more so through our 20s. Research shows that if we’re living at home with parents during this "I don’t know what I’m doing" time, it can stifle the personal development of emerging adults, in part because emerging adults might return to "child roles". But conversely, parents can also provide extensive social and emotional support to their adult children, as well as stability and a "safe haven" through an otherwise unstable period of life, says O’Donnell.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Sean O'Rourke, UL's Dr. Ann-Marie Creaven on delayed adulthood
Reaching those "prescribed" milestones in your 20s isn’t the norm anymore, but the mental health implications for a young adult of living at home seem to depend on the expectations they have of what they should have achieved at their age.
"There's a theory in social psychology called self discrepancy theory. When we feel there's a discrepancy between our actual self and what we aspire to for ourselves, that can lead to a feeling of dejection. There is research showing that people who feel the discrepancy between what they wanted and how they actually are, feel greater levels of anxiety and depression," says O’Donnell.
Emerging adulthood is the ‘self-focused age’ because this is the time in our lives when we have the fewest daily obligations and responsibilities to other people. This brings a lot of freedom and excitement, but can also lead to conflicts if you’re living at home. "Adult children report finding conflicts necessary when living at home as an adult because they need to be able to resolve tensions, where the parent still sees them as a child etc. but for parents, satisfaction with having their adult child living at home is predicted by low levels of conflict. So they’re both wanting something different."
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"The main researcher who proposed emerging adulthood as a stage of life actually saw it as quite a positive stage, although there are obviously elements that seem negative or might feel negative, that it was it was a normal reaction to fewer social constraints on what becoming an adult had to look like." They key is whether you feel held back or constrained from living the way you want to.
Sometimes forgotten in the conversation about changing life courses, is the affect this can have on not just the relationship between the adult child and parent, but on the shape of the parents’ lives as well. "There's so much talk about the empty nest. We expect young adults leaving home to be this sad time for parents but actually they've spent a big chunk of their lives at that point never being first in their own life, really. So they can well deserve to look forward to more independence and privacy and focus on self, which they haven't had for a lot of their memory of their adult lives. So that does get disrupted also," says O'Donnell.
"The parents actually can want more privacy, they want more independence themselves, just being able to make a plan and have a hobby. Not having to think about other people. Those kinds of things people might want and may feel guilty for wanting, because I think as parents we often are made to feel like we should be ultimately selfless."
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
