A portrait of the nest-leaving process in early adulthood

Demography, Vol. 30, No.4, November 1993

A Portrait of the Nest-leaving Process inEarly Adulthood*

Frances GoldscheiderDepartment of SociologyPopulation Studies and Training CenterBrown University, Box 1916Providence, RI02912

Arland ThorntonInstitute for Social ResearchDepartment of SociologyPopulation Studies CenterThe University of MichiganAnn Arbor, MI48106-1248

Linda Young-DeMarcoInstitute for Social ResearchThe University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI48106-1248

This paper provides an in-depth portrait of the nest-leaving process in early adulthoodas it emerged in the 1980s. Event histories are used to describe transitions in and outof the parental home during the years from age 15 through age 23. We focus on therole of the "new" forms of living arrangements in the leaving-home process. namelynonfamily living and cohabitation. The results show that the transition to fullresidential independence is more gradual, with more intermediate steps, than previousstudies suggested. Cohabitation is rare as a route out of the parental home, and bothnonfamily living and cohabitation lead to much higher return rates than doesmarriage.

Research on leaving home in the United States and in other countries has establishedthis residential transition as increasingly important for our understanding of the life course,of intergenerational relationships, and of the structure of the family. Both the timing and thereversibility of the leaving-home transition seem to be changing in confusing ways. Further,

* Support for this analysis and for the data collection on which it was based was provided by the NationalInstitute of Child Health and Human Development. This work also bas benefited from the contributions of a largenumber of people. The paper was read and critiqued by Calvin Goldscheider, Christabel Young, and twoanonymous reviewers, from whom it benefited immeasurably. The interviewers, coders, and computing personnelof the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan provided expertise and perseverance in collecting andprocessing the data. Ronald Freedman, David Goldberg, Lolagene Coombs, and Deborah Freedman playedimportant roles in various waves of the data collection. Judy Baughn and Kashif Sheikh prepared many aspects ofthe manuscript for publication. The authors appreciate these many contributions but retain responsibility for anyerrors.

Copyright © 1993 Population Association of America

683

684 Demography, Vol. 30, No.4, November 1993

the relationship of this to the other transitions of early adulthood has altered with the growthof nonfarnily living throughout the adult life course. As a result, it has become an area ofcompelling and rapidly growing research interest (e.g., Aquilino 1990, 1991; Avery,Goldscheider, and Speare 1992; Christian 1989; Glick and Lin 1985; Goldscheider andDaVanzo 1985, 1989; Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1993; Grigsby 1986; Heer, Hodge,and Felson 1986; Kiernan 1986, 1989; Thornton, Young-DeMarco, and Goldscheider 1993;Young 1975, 1987).

These changes in routes, timing, and reversibility pose considerable challenges to ourunderstanding of the process of leaving home in young adulthood. Young people experiencea wide array of living arrangements, none of which appears to dominate in the early yearsof the leaving-home process (Thornton et al. 1993), but the pathways out of the home havebeen measured, conceptualized, and hence analyzed in very inconsistent ways in previousresearch. More critical is that most of the data sources available for the study of leavinghome have provided only limited information on timing. Researchers have had to relyprimarily on cross-sectional data or on cohort data collected at widely spaced intervals.

Detailed information on timing is needed to clarify many issues, including whether theapparent increase in returning home is the result of a few young adults returning to live withtheir parents for long periods or of many young adults making only short "refueling" visitsto the parental nest before launching themselves again into independence. Detailedinformation on pathways is needed to examine connections between the decline in leavinghome for marriage and the growth of cohabitation in young adulthood. Does cohabitationresemble marriage as a route out of the home? Or does cohabitation have more in commonwith other forms of nonfarnily living-such as living with roommates-in the transition toadulthood? Questions about timing and routes also intersect: Do young adults normallyachieve full residential independence immediately, or do they do so in steps, leaving homefirst for relatively supportive environments, such as the homes of other relatives, and forsemiautonomous living arrangements, such as group quarters?

This paper is designed to address these questions by providing a detailed portrait ofleaving home, of returning home, and of leaving once again. In each case, we consider thewide range of possible living arrangements. We analyze retrospective information on livingarrangements obtained from a sample of a birth cohort of women and men age 23 in 1985.Event histories from these young people, which document their living arrangements by themonth, are used to describe their transitions in and out of the parental home in the yearsfrom age 15 through 23; during those years, 87% left the parental home at least once. Thisanalysis includes estimates of the rates of leaving and returning to the parental home, basedon all absences of four months or more, with some attention to significantly shorter sojourns(as brief as one month). We focus on the role of the "new" forms of residentialarrangements in early adulthood-cohabitation and nonfamily living-in the leaving-homeprocess, and particularly on how they affect the likelihood of returning home.

INCREASING PUZZLES IN THE STUDY OF LEAVING HOME

The rapid increase in research on leaving home is linked to concerns about changingfamily and life course structures and about the growth of nonfamily living, with someattention to generational relationships. Beginning with an awareness of the enormousgrowth in the "empty-nest" stage of the family cycle (Glick and Parke 1965) and therole of the timing of children's departure in this expansion, scholars began to studyyoung adults' leaving home (Goldscheider and DaVanzo 1985; Goldscheider andLeBourdais 1986; Young 1975) and their living at home (Glick and Lin 1985; Heer et al.1986) as well as the potential problems for intergenerational relations implied by their

A Portrait of the Nest-Leaving Process 68S

remaining at home (Aquilino 1990; Grigsby 1986; Schnaiberg and Goldenberg 1989;Suiter and Pillemer 1987). At the same time, research links began to emerge between theliterature on nonfamily living (Kobrin 1976; Ruggles 1988; Santi 1988, 1990) and on thedelay of marriage in the transition to adulthood (Hogan 1981; Marini 1978); researchersbegan to consider that marriage might have been declining as a route out of the parentalhome.

In addition, the definition of "home" became increasingly less clear, the more thealternative living arrangements of young adults were considered. The major problemcentered on how to treat semiautonomous situations such as dormitories and barracks.Have persons living in such quarters "left home"? These living arrangements areimportant in early adulthood, as are the enormous changes that result from fluctuations incollege attendance and military service. Therefore whether these are treated as "home" oras "away from home" makes a substantial difference in the measurement of age atleaving home and of sex differences therein (Goldscheider and DaVanzo 1986), as wellas in trends over time in leaving home (Ruggles 1988). This issue also would affectestimates of rates and patterns of returning home (DaVanzo and Goldscheider 1990;Young 1987; Zeng and Coale 1987) because young adults are likely to return home whencollege or military service ends.

The data sources that define such quarters as living with parents include the CurrentPopulation Survey (CPS), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the NationalLongitudinal Surveys (NLS), and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).The National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72), High Schooland Beyond (HSB), the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), and thedecennial United States censuses treat such quarters as not living with parents. A few ofthese sources provide enough information on living arrangements to allow classification ofcases either way, but in other cases, one must make assumptions about the livingarrangements of those in the armed services and those "away" at college.

We also find dramatic variations in the key distinctions among possible livingarrangements. Should one study "living alone". separately, while grouping other family andnonfamily living arrangements together as less desirably private (Michael, Fuchs, and Scott1980)? Or should one study "nonfamily living" (Christian 1989), thus making a verydifferent theoretical distinction? Also, most recently, the growth of cohabitation in youngadulthood has raised the question of how this new form of living arrangement should betreated: should it be regarded as "couple formation" and hence grouped with marriage(Bongaarts 1983; Thornton 1988), or should it (also) be viewed as a variant on theliving-with-roommates version of nonfamily living?

Studying the timing of leaving home, by whatever route, requires precise informationon dates of leaving home. Many studies had to rely on current status measures usingcross-sectional data, such as censuses and one-time surveys with no retrospectiveinformation; these can show only whether the proportion living with parents differs betweengroups and/or time points (Glick and Lin 1985; Heer et al. 1986). Other research relied onpanel studies such as NLSn, which contain data on living arrangements only at the times ofthe follow-up interviews; often these studies were conducted several years apart (e.g.,Goldscheider and DaVanzo 1989). The data sources that provide nearly continuous temporalinformation (PSID, SIPP) are weak in providing clear information on the routes out of thehome. In contrast, the data described below provide the information needed to examine inminute detail the timing of residential moves, both out of and back into the parental home.They also permit clear differentiation between types of housing (independent housing andgroup quarters) and types of living arrangements by many categories of family andnonfamily relationship, thus allowing us to construct a detailed portrait of the residentialtransition to adulthood.

686

Data

Demography, Vol. 30, No.4, November 1993

DATA, MEASURES, AND METHODS

The data used in this article come from a panel study that began with a probabilitysample of first-, second-, and fourth-born white children drawn from the July 1961 birthrecords of the Detroit Metropolitan Area. The mothers of these children were interviewedseven times between 1962 and 1985; the children were interviewed in 1980 and 1985.Although multiple waves of information are available from both children and mothers, thisanalysis is limited primarily to the data obtained from the children in 1985 because livingarrangement histories were obtained only from the children and only in 1985.

The original 1962 survey interviewed 92% of the sampled mothers, and the studymaintained the cooperation of a large percentage of the families over the full 23 years. In1985, interviews were obtained with 932 (85%) of the children whose mothers wereinterviewed originally in 1962. The families represented by these children are very similarto those interviewed in 1962, an indication that attrition did not substantially affect samplerepresentativeness.

Although our sample was drawn from the entire white population of the DetroitMetropolitan Area, the participating families were living primarily outside the central city ofDetroit by the time the children reached young adulthood. A substantial minority of thefamilies (30%) also had left the area to live in other states or elsewhere in Michigan.Analyses of comparable national data on young adults have produced results that closelyresemble those obtained from these data, both in background characteristics (i.e., parentaleducation and income) and in behavior and attitudes (Thornton et al. 1993).

Nevertheless, previous research has shown that young adults living outsidemetropolitan areas are more likely than others to leave home, particularly to live indormitories (Goldscheider and DaVanzo 1989). Thus we were concerned that this findingmight present a particular problem for an analysis using data from a metropolitan area. Acomparison of the Detroit data with the NLS72, however, shows that differences on thesetwo issues, although evident, are less problematic than might have been expected. This isthe case particularly for males: nationally, in 1973, 50% of male and 61% of femalefull-time first-year college students were living in dormitories (Goldscheider and DaVanzo1986), compared with 43% and 44% for the current sample.

We also constructed a parallel sample of young adults from the NSFH, pooling birthyears 1960 through 1962. Both analyses used the four months' definition for leaving home,and found that somewhat more young adults had ever left home by age 21 in the NSFH(71% versus 66% for males; 82% versus 72% for females). Yet a comparison 'Of the NSFHwith the 1980 United States census suggests that respondents in the NSFH, which did notuse a calendar format, were quite likely to underestimate their age at leaving home(Biddlecom, St. Clair, and Goldscheider, 1993). These differences, although real, shouldnot divert research attention from realizing the value of this unique data source.

Measures

The histories of living arrangements used in this paper were obtained through the use ofa life history calendar, which is described in detail by Freedman et al. (1988). The calendarprocedure obtained information about the statuses and transitions of the study participants inseveral domains of life, including geographical location, marriage, cohabitation, fertility,living arrangements, education, labor force participation, and military service. Thisinformation was obtained monthly for the period from age 15 through the time of the 1985

A Portrait of the Nest-Leaving Process 687

survey, which was conducted when the participants were between 23 1/2 and 24 years old.Hence, although these data are limited geographically (primarily the midwest) and racially(only whites), as well in terms of the life course (only the early stages of the nest-leavingprocess), they are the best source currently available for studying the dynamics of leavingand returning home during the 1980s.

From these living arrangements histories, we defined eight categories of livingarrangements. These categories are based on 1) the type of housing (household versus groupquarters) in which persons might live and 2) individuals (if any) with whom they mightshare living quarters rather than living with parents. Each of these categories is conceptuallystraightforward. Our methods for obtaining information on cohabitation were very similar tothose of the three major data sources used for the study of cohabitation, the NSFH, theNLSn, and the National Survey of Family Growth, each of which integrated their questionsabout cohabitation with their marital history questions in a quasi-calendar format. We asked:"Have you ever lived together as a partner in an intimate relationship with a (man/woman)without being married to (him/her)?" In addition to obtaining the beginning and endingdates, we asked if the cohabitation was transformed into marriage and, if so, when. (Formore detail on the classification process, see Thornton et al. 1993.)

For the purposes of this analysis, these types of living arrangements have been sortedinto three conceptual groups, defined below. They are ordered in increasing average levelsof independence and/or adult status, based on the acquisition of adult family roles as spouseor partner and on the relinquishment of the most dependent family role (child). (No one lefthome directly to live as an independent parent who had not been living with parents for atleast a month in a generationally complex household.)

Family dependence. This includes living dependently with or without new family roles(with own parents or with spouse's/partner's parents), or with relatives other than a parent:

1. Simple family dependence;2. Generational complexity;3. Other relatives.

Nonfamily living. Includes living away from parents, either with nonrelatives (ininstitutional settings such as dormitories or barracks, or in an independent residence) oralone:

4. Group quarters;5. Housemates;6. Alone.

Family independence. Includes living away from parents with persons with whom theyhave established new adult family or quasi-family roles:

7. Cohabitation;8. Marriage.

Methods

For our analysis of residential transitions from and back to simple parental dependence,we use life table techniques, calculating monthly age-specific rates of 1) first departuresfrom home for each specific living arrangement, 2) first returns home from each of theseliving arrangements, and 3) second exits from the parental home. We estimated these ratesfor six-month intervals by dividing the number of first exits to a particular livingarrangement during the six-month interval by the number of person-months lived during that


interval. In addition to calculating age-specific rates of exit, return, and re-exit for eachspecific living arrangement, we estimated the cumulative percentages who had ever exited(returned to, or left again from) the parental home for the first time for each type of livingarrangement at each six-month interval from age 15 through 23 1/2.

FIRST EXITS FROM THE PARENTAL HOME

We begin the analysis by asking two basic questions about the process of leavinghome: What is the rate of leaving home for the first time? What are the most frequent initialresidential pathways out of the parental home? We focus on the transition from simplefamily dependence, distinguishing it from later transitions out of generationally complexliving arrangements. Many of the latter are also with the parental family, but sometimes wewill refer to the transition as "leaving home." Throughout this analysis, any experience ofmarriage, cohabitation, or parenthood, no matter how brief, is counted as a significantliving arrangement. Normally, however, we exclude short experiences (four months or less)of living with other relatives, with housemates, alone, or in a dormitory, barracks, or camp,noting (where appropriate) what difference this categorization makes.

Figure I shows age-specific rates of first exits from simple family dependence for morethan four months for males and females. Panel A of Table 1 provides age-specificcumulative percentages who have ever left home for that length of time; Panel B presentsthe same information but includes departures from home as short as a month's duration,each for both males and females. These data make clear that the process of leaving homedoes not begin in earnest for young people until after they have reached 18. Relatively fewindividuals left simple family dependence before that age: the figures increase slowlybetween ages 15 and 17. Fewer than one-eighth had lived apart from their parents for fourmonths or more before that age. This proportion increases only a little, to just overone-fifth, when those who had been away for as little as one month are included. We foundessentially no difference between males and females at these ages.

A pattern of gender differences emerges at age 18: males are less likely to leave homebetween age 18 and 22. The leaving-home process also changes dramatically at age 18,when the rate of first exit from the parental home increases sharply. For most of the young

51 l'5

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Exit Rate 2511+ D FflUifS

151.5I

15 16 11 11 l' 2. 21 22Age

Figure I. Monthly Age- and Sex-Specific Rates of Exit from Parental Home(per 1,000. Duration Away 4+ Months)


Table 1. First Exits from the Parental Home, by Sex and DestinationLiving Arrangements

FamilyDependence Nonfamily Living Family Independence

Exact Generation Other Group House- Alone Cohabitation MarriageAge" Total Complex Relatives Quarters mates

A. Cumulative Percentage Having Exited the Parental Home forEach Living Arrangement"

Males

18 12.2 2.4 3.4 3.0 2.4 0.6 0.4 0.021 65.7 4.1 6.9 29.2 12.2 4.9 6.0 2.423 78.5 4.3 7.9 30.0 15.2 8.4 7.9 4.7N 466

Females

18 12.5 1.3 2.6 1.7 2.6 0.2 2.6 1.521 70.6 3.9 6.3 29.2 9.5 2.8 8.2 10.823 82.9 4.3 7.6 29.2 11.7 4.3 10.8 15.1N 463

B. Cumulative Percentage Having Exited the Parental Home for EachDestination, Including Short Spells Away from Home

Males

18 21.5 2.1 6.9 5.8 4.7 1.5 0.4 0.021 71.9 3.9 10.5 29.6 14.8 6.0 5.2 1.923 82.4 4.1 10.9 30.9 17.4 8.8 6.4 3.9N 466

Females

18 20.5 1.3 5.8 4.8 4.5 0.2 2.4 1.521 74.7 3.5 9.9 30.2 12.3 2.2 6.9 9.723 86.8 3.7 11.4 30.2 14.5 4.1 9.3 13.6N 463

a By the given age.b These estimates ignore all times away from the parental home that did not last more than four

months (unless they involved cohabition or marriage).

people in the sample, the six months following their eighteenth birthdays mark the first fallafter the completion of high school; large numbers moved away from their parental homesduring that period. Rates of first exits from the parental home decline substantially insubsequent periods (although they never return to the relatively low levels before age 18),with some indication of a second peak at age 22 at the end of the data series.

Primarily as a result of the spike in the eighteenth year, nearly 70% had lived awayfrom home for four months or more by age 21; the reduction in exit rates after those agesthen brought this proportion to just over 80% by age 23. The inclusion of shorter durationsaway has little effect on these cumulative percentages: each increases by only about fourpercentage points.

Pathways out of the parental home also change substantially over these early adultyears. The most frequent destination points for the very early (before to age 18) firsttransitions from living in simple parental dependence were living with other relatives, group


quarters, and living with housemates. These destinations, however, look very much likesummer vacations because about half of these sojourns were for four months or less.

After the 15-18 age interval, living with other relatives declines in importance as apathway out of the parental home for both men and women. Group quarters come todominate the surge of leaving home that occurs for both sexes at age 18, as shown so clearlyin Figure 1. The destination detail in Table 1 shows that extraordinary numbers of youngadults leave their parental homes for group quarters during the year after they reached theireighteenth birthdays. Most of this exodus occurs in the first six months after they reach thatbirthday (data not presented). This clustered timing, however, is probably accentuated forthe young adults in these data because all of their birthdays were in July.

This shift occurs for both men and women, and is certainly associated with thetransition from high school to college for many in this cohort of young Americans. Thisroute out of the parental home is so important at age 18 that it accounts for aboutthree-quarters of all first transitions away from the parental home during this one key period(data not presented). By the time these young people reach age 21, approximately three ofevery 10 have experienced their first home-leaving through the group quarters route; thisfigure represents about 40% of all those who had ever left home by age 21. Nevertheless, amajority leave home by other routes even during these ages (with the exception of the firstsix months after high school). After age 21, group quarters disappear almost completely asan avenue out of the parental home.

Starting with the interval between age 21 and 23, Table 1 shows an expansion of themore adult living arrangements. Among persons living with family, leaving the nest forindependent living associated with marriage takes precedence over living with otherrelatives or in generationally complex households; cohabitation also decreases inimportance. Similarly, living alone begins to dominate among the nonfamily livingarrangements.

Young women make transitions to new family roles at younger ages than young men.Family formation becomes a more important route out of the parental home than nonfamilyliving during their twentieth year. This finding indicates that women marry at earlier agesthan men, and shows that they are more likely than young men of the same age to cohabitwith partners who are able to support an independent residence based both on age andearnings. This difference probably accounts for females' greater overall rate of leavinghome. Nonfamily living arrangements remain the most important destinations for youngmen throughout the age range of observation, although we see clear signs of convergenceafter age 21.

Understanding First Departures

In the heterogeneous array of living arrangements, it is possible that previous researchunderestimated the importance of certain pathways out of the parental home because thestays are brief, and overestimated those of longer duration. This possibility is particularlyproblematic for analyses of residential arrangements in early adulthood based on surveysthat collected information only at relatively wide intervals (e.g., NLSn, HSB). Suchsurveys are likely to miss the initial homeleaving transition and to interpret later,longer-lasting arrangements as routes out of the parental home.

To address this issue, we measure young peoples' experience in a given livingarrangement during these early years, to show which would be more likely to appear as firstliving arrangements when measurement is infrequent. We compare these results with ourinformation based on their actual transitions out of the parental home (employing theone-month definition to maximize the contrast). Table 2 presents this analysis, with five


Table 2. Relationship between the Percentage Going to Each Destination, and theAverage Duration of Time Spent in Each Destination, Age Range 15-23 Years

% Total % First Stop % Years % Experience Away Ratio

Generational Males

Complexity 4.1 4.9 1.1 3.5 1.40Other Relatives 10.9 13.2 1.8 5.7 2.28Group Quarters 30.9 37.5 6.8 21.8 1.71Housemates 17.4 21.1 9.2 29.5 0.71Alone 8.8 10.6 3.1 9.9 1.07Cohabitation 6.4 7.7 4.0 12.8 0.60Marriage 3.9 4.7 5.1 16.3 0.28Total Away 82.4 100.0 31.1 100.0 1.00(Total Home) 17.6 NA 68.9 NA NAN 565 466 5,085 1581 NA

Females

GenerationalComplexity 3.7 4.2 1.7 4.9 0.86

Other Relatives 11.4 13.1 1.9 5.5 2.38Group Quarters 30.2 34.7 5.7 16.5 2.10Housemates 14.5 16.7 6.8 19.7 0.84Alone 4.1 4.7 2.2 6.3 0.74Cohabitation 9.3 10.7 4.7 13.6 0.78Marriage 13.6 15.6 U.5 33.3 0.47Total Away 86.8 100.0 34.5 100.0 1.00(Total Home) 13.2 NA 65.5 NA NAN 533 463 4,797 1,655 NA

columns of information for each sex. Column 1 shows the proportion leaving home to agiven living arrangement; Column 2 ("first stop") converts these values to percentagesbased on those who had ever left home by age 23 (from Table 1, Panel B). Column 3 showsthe percentage of years the sample as a whole spent in the given living arrangement.Column 4 ("% Experience Away") shows the percentage of time spent in a given livingarrangement by age 23, deducting the time in the parental home. (Information on thecalculations underlying Columns 3 and 4 can be found in Thornton et al. 1993.) Column 5("Ratio") then compares these two indicators (columns 2 and 4); the ratio can be interpretedas showing the direction of bias that results from trying to study the nest-leaving process byusing data collected at fixed, widely spaced intervals.

This analysis suggests that the transition to fJ.llr residential independence is moregradual, with more intermediate steps, than less detailed data would suggest, at least amongthose whose leaving-home experience is concentrated at young ages. This is the caseparticularly for routes based on nonfarnily living, but the analysis also highlights theimportance of family living arrangements as a first transition from the parental home. Bothinstitutional living arrangements and living with other relatives are particularly importantpathways out of the parental home; these pathways would be underestimated without precisemeasurement. More than one-third of the young women and men who had left home beforeage 23 lived in a dormitory, barracks, or camp as their first nonparentalliving arrangement,and more than one in eight lived with other relatives. These proportions reflect at least twice


the likelihood of finding them in the respective living arrangements during the years fromage 15 through 23 (1.7 to 2.2 for group quarters and 2.3 to 2.4 for other relatives).

Data not presented here show that of all the people who had ever lived in a dormitoryby age 23, fully four-fifths did so as their first nonparentalliving arrangement. This figureis not affected by the choice of duration. Living with other relatives presents an even moreextreme "first stop" profile: of those who ever lived with other relatives for four months ormore during these years, about five of six did so as a first transition out of the parentalhome.

Among other nonfarnily living arrangements, both living alone and living withhousemates account for fewer exits out of the home than for the fraction of all livingexperience, on the basis of this comparison (they are as little as 70% as common). Marriageand cohabitation are even more rare as exits from the parental home. These findings suggestthat these living arrangements normally occur only after some other kind of nonparentalresidence is experienced first. This pattern is particularly marked for marriage, both foryoung men and young women. Some form of premarital residential independence-or atleast of semiautonomy in group quarters-is the rule rather than the exception among thosemarrying for the first time before age 23. Whereas one-sixth of young men's time and morethan one-third of young women's time spent outside the parental home is spent in marriedindependence, in fact fewer than 5% of young men and about 16% of young women wholeft their parents' home went directly to a new marital home. (Although these results alsocould result from differences in duration among these different living arrangements,examination of results that control for this issue shows that differences in duration accountfor relatively little of the difference observed; see Thornton et al. 1993).

On this dimension, cohabitation appears to be less like family living and more like thenonfamily living arrangements, such as living with housemates and living alone. Its share asa route out of the home is nearly matched by its extensiveness in this age range, particularlyfor young women.

THE RATE OF RETURNING HOME

Our focus on delineating the leaving-home process should not blind scholars to theimportance of remaining in-and returning to-the parental home early in adulthood. Evenin these detailed data, about one-fifth of young adults reported never being away from theparental home for more than four months by age 23. Also, at any given time, it is likely thatmany more will be living at home because many return home quite quickly, after relativelybrief stays away. This finding reinforces the importance of taking into account the role ofreturning home in our portrait of the nest-leaving process in young adulthood. In this sectionwe ask the following questions: How many young people return home, and for how long?What are the sources of such returns-that is, from what places do young people return? Aresome living arrangements more permanent routes out of the parental home than others?

Our analysis focuses on returns home lasting four months or more. Analyses of shorterreturns show that more than 90% of all short sojourns in the parental home are returns fromliving either in group quarters or with housemates; most of these occur during the summermonths (data not shown). On the basis of these findings, we exclude short returns in mostof our analyses of the risks of returning home.

Even with this exclusion, returning home is relatively common: one-third or morereturn for four months or more after their first departure of comparable length from theparental home. What factors influence returning home? Does length of time away matter?How does the type of pathway taken out of the parental home affect the likelihood ofreturning? Our next set of analyses deals with these questions, based on a life table analysis


of the risk of returning home parallel to our analysis of leaving home. These analyses showsome patterns that most observers would find obvious, and even more that might seemsurprising.

The monthly rate of returning home for a long period first declines with duration awayfrom home, until well into the fourth year (42 months) away. Then it rises rapidly to asecond, even higher peak at the end of four years (Figure 2). This pattern characterizes bothyoung men and young women; their return rates resemble each other closely through thefirst four years or so away from home, before diverging sharply. These high risks of returnaccumulate rapidly, so that more than one-quarter of young adults who had been away fromhome for four months or more had returned for an equal or longer time within two yearsafter the original departure (Table 3, Panel A). More than half had done so before the endof five years. Clearly, even after we prune out the very short returns and visits home for thesummer, many young adults leaving home during the late 1970s and early 1980s returnedfor substantial lengths of time. (Inclusion of short periods away or at home inflates thesefractions even more; see Panel B. Even when we use this definition, however, nearly 30%of those who had left at all had not returned even for a month five years later.)

The existence of a second peak in risks of returning home after four years suggestsstrongly that many of those who left home because they wanted to attend a residentialcollege returned for at least some time after they completed their programs. This tendencyis shown clearly in the pattern of return rates for those who left home for group quarters.Panel A of Table 3 shows that the cumulative percentages returning home from groupquarters jumped from 37% at the end of three years (most of which occurred in the firstyear) to 66% by the end of five years. Clearly, the increase in college attendance away fromhome contributed to the phenomenon of returning home for this cohort, who finishedcollege in the midst of the recession of the early 1980s.

None of the other living arrangements destinations exhibit this pattern; some showrelatively steady declines in the risk of returning home with duration away, and others showno clear pattern. The most similar trend is among those who left to live with housemates;this finding suggests that some of these arrangements also were linked with attendingschool. The numbers who left for most of these living arrangements, however, are too smallto provide stable bases for showing significant differences in rates of return, whether overtime or between pathways.

Return patterns differ in other ways by route out of the home; many of these are

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Months' Duration since First ExitFigure 2. Rate of Returning Home for a Stay of Four Months or More, by Duration Away and by Sex


Table 3. First Extended Returns to the Parental Home (Both Sexes), by LivingArrangements at First Departure

Months Family Dependence Nonfamily Living Family IndependenceDuration Generation Other Group House- Alone Cohabitation MarriageAwaya Totalb Complex Relatives Quarters mates

A. Cumulative Percentage Having Returned to the Parental Home,by Departure Destination

12 18.0 19.3 22.8 20.1 22.9 10.0 20.0 2.424 27.5 22.2 36.0 30.4 39.0 12.4 27.5 3.836 31.9 22.2 39.5 37.1 42.2 15.8 27.5 8.160 51.5 32.1 46.7 66.4 53.3 20.1 33.3 11.5Nd 723 37 68 274 118 54 76 86

B. Cumulative Percentage Having Returned to the Parental Home from EachLiving Arrangement, Including Short Spells Away from Horne"

12 55.3 21.1 58.2 84.0 51.1 24.6 29.1 2.824 61.7 30.3 67.5 86.2 65.3 27.2 36.0 6.136 64.7 30.3 71.1 89.7 67.9 30.4 36.0 10.560 71.0 46.5 75.9 93.4 75.1 34.6 46.7 13.9Nd 779 34 94 279 144 58 69 78

a Duration-specific rates are for six-month periods ending with the exact duration listed. Thecumulative percentages are for durations up to the duration indicated.

b Includes those for whom first destination is unknown (10 cases).C These estimates include all times away from the parental home, even those which did not last

more than four months.d Number who left home once and were eligible to return.

intriguing. In general, young adults who left home to live with nonrelatives are more likelyto have returned for a considerable length of time than those who departed to some form offamily living. More than half of those who went to live with housemates and abouttwo-thirds of those who went to group quarters had returned within five years, comparedwith less than one-third among those whose first residential move was to new familydependence in a generationally complex household and with barely one-tenth of those wholeft in conjunction with marriage. Hence, if returning home has increased in the last fewdecades, this increase is likely to reflect the greater role of nonfamily living in livingarrangements in early adulthood.

Nevertheless, we find considerable heterogeneity among pathways within these twocategories (nonfamily and family). Those who left to live alone were much less likely toreturn than those whose nonfamily living arrangements involved living with others, either ingroup quarters or in an apartment. Barely one-fifth of the former had returned within fiveyears.

Among those whose pathway out of the home was to some sort of family living, onlythose leaving in conjunction with marriage were truly unlikely to return. Cohabitors werevery likely to return home (alone) for an extended stay; one-third had returned to simpleparental dependence by the end of five years after they left. This proportion was about thesame as for those in generationally complex households (32%), and generally was closer tothe return rates of those who left to live with housemates than of those who left to marriage.This is the case particularly at short durations: by one year away, 23% of those who left tolive with housemates and 20% of those leaving to cohabit had returned, compared with 2%


among those leaving for marriage. The same pattern holds at two and three years' durationaway, although the gap widens between those who left to live with housemates and thosecohabiting. Thus, by five years' duration, return rates for cohabitors (33%) lie midwaybetween rates for those with housemates (53%) and for the married (11%). Young (1987)found a similar pattern for Australia among those who left home to cohabit. Hence, on thisdimension, it is difficult to argue that cohabitors resemble married people.

LEAVING HOME AGAIN

Our final analysis focuses on leaving home again. How long do the young people stay?Does the length of stay influence how likely they are to leave? Where do they go when theyleave the second time? Are their destinations different this time? That is, do they aimdifferently on the second launch?

Of the 297 young people who came home to live for four or more months after havinglived away from the parental home for at least that length of time, we observed that 167 leftagain; three-quarters did so within two years. We find almost no duration dependence in themonthly risks of leaving again; a slight peak occurs for both males and females at 6-11months (Figure 3). Risks tend somewhat to decline with increasing duration; this pointsuggests that selectively, those with more reason to remain are coming to dominate thegroup who are still at home after returning. Yet either such selectivity is quite weak at theseyoung ages, or it is almost offset by increases in pressure on some of those who returnedhome to leave again.

Females are considerably more likely than males to leave again, often with substantialdifferences. As with leaving home for the first time, however, this difference primarilyreflects females' greater likelihood of entering new family living arrangements, via bothmarriage and cohabitation. This difference clearly emerges in Table 4, which shows thedistribution of destination living arrangements. The table distinguishes first from seconddepartures, separately by sex. Males and females seem quite similar, except that females aremore likely than males to leave for marriage when they leave again (as was true on firstdepartures) and are less likely to leave home to live alone.

Second departures look very much like first ones, with a slightly greater emphasis onhousemates and on living alone than on group quarters. Apparently, many young adults

...•• 15

....Rate of ...

Leaving Again

••R

••11

Months' Duration Back in the Parental Ho-eFigure 3. Monthly Rates of Leaving the Parental Home a Second Time (Total and by Sex)


Table 4. First and Second Exits from the Parental Home, by Distribution of DestinationLiving Arrangements

Family Dependence Nonfamily Living Family IndependenceExact Generation Other Group House- Alone Cohabitation MarriageAge" Total Complex Relatives Quarters mates

MalesBetween Ages First Leaving

15-21 100.0 6.2 10.5 44,4 18.6 7.5 9.1 3.721-23 100.0 1.6 7.8 6.2 23,4 27.3 14.8 18.0Months Home Second Leaving

4 1/2-12 100.0 0.0 8.0 33.0 35,4 10,4 12.8 0.012 -36 100.0 8.0 3.5 11.8 19.7 29.0 17.0 11.0

FemalesBetween Ages First Leaving

15-21 100.0 5.5 8.9 41.3 13,4 4.0 11.6 15.321-23 100.0 3.3 10.6 0.0 17.9 12.2 21.1 35.0Months Home Second Leaving

4 1/2-12 100.0 7.9 6.0 24.9 33.5 6.0 11.8 9.921 -36 100.0 6.3 9.6 11.7 17.2 13.6 17.8 23.8

a By the given age.

come home for a semester or more and still return to school-perhaps to another school. Wefind a somewhat smaller tendency to leave for marriage the second time around, which ismore pronounced among women. This situation is unlikely to be the result of a negativemarital experience because only 3% of these returnees had been married while they wereliving away from the parental home. It is more likely to reflect the selective effects ofeliminating those who married very early, nearly all of whom had remained at home untilthey married.

DISCUSSION

Using newly available, detailed data, we have examined the process of leaving andreturning home in early adulthood, with the goal of clarifying many of the remainingpuzzles about living arrangements. The resulting portrait is sharply drawn, although it islimited in terms of the original sample, which is relatively small and does not include theexperiences of nonwhites. In addition, we conducted our life table analyses in the presenceof a substantial amount of right-censored data, so that the life table resultsdisproportionately represent the experience of those who left relatively early and returnedrelatively early. Relatively few persons left home at older ages, and even fewer returnedthereafter. Nevertheless, the analysis of these data provides many answers to questions thatwere left by data not designed for the study of nest-leaving.

Nest-leaving is concentrated in the 18-21 age range: only one person in eight had livedaway from home for four months or more before age 18,whereas a substantial fraction of allfirst nest-leaving occurred in the next six months. The process ends much less abruptly:


about one-fifth had never lived away from home for four months or more by age 23, and15% had never left for even one month. Yet high proportions of these departures areaccompanied by relatively long returns. Within two years of a first departure of four monthsor longer, 25% had returned for a substantial sojourn, and 50% had done so within fiveyears.

Schooling clearly structures the first major departures from home, in view of theconcentration at age 18. At that age, those going on to a coresidential college move out tolive in group quarters, and those ending their schooling begin their adult lives. Similarly, theend of college emerges as a clear peak in the risks of returning"home, which otherwisedecline with duration away. Nevertheless, although the transitions associated with educationare linked clearly with these transitions, as marriage also was linked closely in the past,educational transitions by no means dominate the larger phenomenon.

In the great, heterogeneous array of living arrangements in which young adults spendtime over these years, this analysis makes clear that a somewhat smaller group ofarrangements play major roles in the first transition out of the parental home. The transitionfrom home is more gradual than earlier research suggested, with more steps and with thefirst step more dependent. Group quarters emerge as an even more important firstdestination than less precise data shows, and the importance of living with other relatives fora brief period has been overlooked almost completely.

The emerging phenomenon of the "return to the nest" seems to be linked to the growthin nonfarnily living in early adulthood because the risks of returning home are much greaterin this case than when young adults enter adult family relationships. In this context,however, cohabitation in many ways resembles living with housemates more than itresembles marriage. It may be that cohabiting relationships are more stable at older ages,but this is clearly not the case for these young adults.

This analysis also shows that young women are more likely to leave home than youngmen. Much ofthe difference relates to women's younger age at marriage, but other researchhas shown that women, even among the unmarried, are more likely than men to live awayfrom parents. When we separate cohabitation, however, the results shown above seem tosuggest that differences among the unmarried may be the result of women's earlier entryinto cohabitation. In this way, cohabitation shows a parallel with marriage in that womenare incorporated into both relationships earlier than men, although gender differences incohabitation are much less than those in marriage (Thornton, 1988).

This detailed portrait of the nest-leaving process in early adulthood reinforces patternsfound in previous research and raises new questions. Clearly the interposition of nonfamilyliving between living in the parental home and the formation of a new family in adulthoodhas led to a great complexity of living arrangements. Nonfamily living also seems to belinked to a great volatility in the leaving- and returning-home transition. It may be that thelate twentieth century is a transitional period in the twentieth-century saga of youngadulthood: the simplicity of the life course of the 1950i'has given way, but a new, morecoherent series of steps has yet to emerge. Again, and more simply, it may reflect theunsettled state of the job and marriage markets of young adults, resulting from the economicreverses of the 1980s. Are young adults forced to return home because of failures in thesystem, or are they risking the opportunity to solidify their chances in the more competitivearenas by making short-run investments in residential independence? Clearly, those who areconcerned with young adults' negotiation of the larger challenges they face in their movetoward independence-of schooling progress, career entry, and family formation-musttake into account these complex relationships with the parental home.


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A portrait of the nest-leaving process in early adulthood

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