The timing of and reasons why young people in Germany return to their parental home

ABSTRACT

From a life course perspective, living independently, outside of the parental home is widely considered to be a key step towards adulthood. However, leaving the parental home can be a reversible process. This article provides empirical evidence of several ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors affecting the timing, and therefore the likelihood of young people’s return to the parental home in Germany. The discrete-time survival analysis used here is based on the second wave of the survey AID:A conducted by the German Youth Institute in 2014/15. The sample comprises 5,518 young adults aged 18–32 years who have already moved out of their parental home at least once. The results show that a return is more likely if the young adults become unemployed, when they finish university or if they left home with the intention of this being only a temporary change (e.g. stay abroad, social year). In the light of this evidence, young adults’ spatial mobility can be considered not so much the result of voluntary decisions made by the actors themselves, but can rather be seen as being dependent on their ability to take further steps towards adulthood with some certainty that these steps will not need to be reversed.

KEYWORDS:

• Life course research
• likelihood to return
• young adults
• transition markers
• AID:A
• Germany

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to Jane Waldmann and George Austin-Cliff for the English proofreading of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this article, just a time span of 14 years – instead of the expected 17 years – for a likely return after the first move-out is shown. The reason is that there are no young adults in the sample who returned after more than 14 years. Therefore, no statistical variance is provided for the years 15, 16 and 17.

2 The timing (Kaplan-Meier estimates) of leaving the parental home for the first time is 20 years for young women and 21 for young men in the subsample. In comparison to that, it must be noted that the median age of all 18–32 year olds in both waves of AID:A is 21 years for young women and 23 years for young men (own calculations of the author, not shown here). Therefore, it must be noted that the young adults observed here were younger when they moved out for the first time than all young adults aged 18–32 years, regardless of whether they had returned. The reason for this younger age in this special group might be the missing right-censored data for people older than 32 years.