Young, free and single? The rise of independent living

Abstract

A distinctive feature of the emergence in many Western nations of young adulthood as a new life stage has been the parallel rise of independent living. Patterns in leaving home were considered in the previous chapter. Here we consider alternative living arrangements experienced by single young people on leaving the parental home, focusing in particular on shared households, and highlighting the significance of social class to understanding these trends. Patterns of household formation in the UK and Australia form the primary focus, although some of the themes discussed here are applicable elsewhere, including Northern Europe and North America. Until relatively recently, research on young people and household formation has focusedmostly on leaving and returning to the parental home (e.g. Jones 1995; Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999), with little focus on young people’s living arrangements once having left. The tracking of young people’s domestic transitions in terms of movement from the parental household towards their own families has also tended to prioritise couple households as markers of authentic ‘adulthood’. Considered historically, there is some logic to this: in the early 1960s, for example, the median age of first marriage in the UK was at its lowest recorded age and served as a reasonable proxy for the age of first leaving home. However, a broader historical perspective highlights that the relatively low median ageof first marriage during the immediate post-war years is in fact anomalous, and the close link between home leaving and marriage during that period certainly no longer pertains. In the UK, for example, the number of first marriages registered in 2005 was less than half those registered in 1970, while the median age of first marriage rose from 23 for men and 21 for women in 1971 to 30.6 and 28.4 for men and women respectively in 2001 (Heath and Cleaver 2003; Office for National Statistics 2005). Similar trends have emerged across Europe, albeit varying significantly between north and south, as well as in the USA and Australia. In the USA, the median age of first marriage was 27.1 for men and 25.3 for women in 2003, compared with 23.2 and 20.8 in 1970 (Fields 2004), and in Australia 23.3 for men and 20.9 for women in 1974, rising to 29.6 for men and 27.6 for women in 2006 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1997; 2007).