Leaving Home for Marital and Non-marital Reasons in the Netherlands, 1850–1940: The Impact of Parental Death and Parental Remarriage

Matthias Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge ()
Additional contact information
Matthias Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge: Federal Institute for Population Research

European Journal of Population, 2022, vol. 38, issue 3, No 3, 377-400

Abstract: Abstract Previous research shows that parentally bereaved children in north-western Europe in the past left home earlier than children who lived together with both biological parents. This article analyses the mechanisms behind this phenomenon with a special focus on the routes out of the parental household and the entry of step-parents and step-siblings. The Historical Sample of the Netherlands is exploited which contains detailed information about household composition and life courses of more than 22,000 female and male adolescent and young adult children born between 1850 and 1922. Event-history analysis is applied, and two exclusive routes out of the parental household, for marital and non-marital reasons, are studied in a competing risk design. The results show that parental loss does not increase the risk of early marriage before age 23, but strongly enhances the chances for leaving home for non-marital reasons, which are mainly work-related. This is especially true in case of maternal loss. No support is found for the hypothesis that the entry of a step-parent and step-siblings increases the risk of leaving home compared to living with a single widowed parent. Tensions with step-parents therefore do not suffice to explain why parentally bereaved children left earlier for non-marital reasons. Instead, we argue that children’s exit was in the interest of both the single widowed parent and the bereaved child.

Keywords: Leaving home; Life-course; Historical demography; Parental death; Competing risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-022-09614-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurpop:v:38:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s10680-022-09614-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-022-09614-7

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

More articles in European Journal of Population from Springer, European Association for Population Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().