Abstract
Competing claims exist about how the geographic distance between parents and their adult children has changed historically. A classic modernisation hypothesis is that people currently live further away from their parents than in the past. Others have argued for stability and the remaining importance of local family ties, in spite of a long‐term decline in co‐residence of adult children and parents. The current paper uses a novel design that relies on reports by grandchildren to study long‐term changes in intergenerational proximity in the Netherlands. The analyses show that there has been a clear and continuous decline in intergenerational proximity between the 1940s and the 1990s. Mediation analyses show that educational expansion and urbanisation are the main reasons why proximity declined. No evidence is found for the role of secularisation and increasing international migration. Proximity to parents declined somewhat more strongly for women than for men.
Highlights
How close people live to their parents has been a topic of study in two fields
Migration depends on economic opportunities and household dynamics and on the broader family context, that is, the dispersion of family members who do not live in the household
In the last part of the analyses, I tested interaction effects with time. These analyses addressed the question of whether differences by education, urbanisation, religion and migrant status changed over time
Summary
How close people live to their parents has been a topic of study in two fields. In family studies, the geographic distance between parents and children has been considered a dimension of family solidarity in an ageing society (Roberts et al, 1991). In an analysis of the German Ageing Study, Steinbach et al (2020) showed that the distance of parents to their adult children increased from 1996 to 2014 In contrast to these findings, a comparison of three British surveys conducted between 1986 and 1999 revealed stability in the proportion of daughters living within half an hour's journey time of their mother (Shelton & Grundy, 2000). For the period we study, we would expect that because an increasing number of people are living in urban areas, proximity to parents has declined over time. In a Dutch study, De Graaf et al (2011) found that about a quarter of Turkish and Moroccan first and second-generation immigrants aged 18–45 lived in the same neighbourhood as their parents, compared with only 10% among people aged 18–45 without a migration background, even after controlling for urbanisation, education and demographic characteristics (De Graaf et al, 2011).
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