Factors associated with the timing and duration of the leaving-home stage of the family life cycle

Summary

Based on empirical age distributions of sons and daughters leaving home, an examination is made of the theoretical effect of three factors — the sex composition of the family, the interval between births, and their reasons for leaving home — on the dynamics of the leaving-home stage in the life cycle of two-child families. Consideration is given to four measures, the timing of the beginning and end of the leaving-home stage, its duration, and the ratio of the length of the leaving-home stage to the length of the childbearing stage. The outstanding feature of the leaving-home stage is that a second child may leave home before its older sibling, described as the ‘crossing-over effect’. For Australian data, factors contributing to the variation in experience between families include the fact that sons generally leave home at an older age than daughters, and that children leaving home for different reasons leave at different ages. Brief reference is made to the relationship between the leaving-home stage and the starting-work stage, and to the limitations of a theoretical analysis.