Kevin Schurer 

“Children stuck living with parents until 24 after house price surge”

“Number of adults living with parents in England and Wales rises by 700,000 in a decade”

These headlines appeared, respectively, in the Daily Telegraph and Guardian newspapers in May 2023. They were prompted by a report issued the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which announced that more families in England and Wales had adult children living with them in 2021 compared with a decade earlier. The total number of adult children living with their parents increased 14.7 percent between 2011 and 2021, from around 4.2 million to around 4.9 million.  The average (median) age of adult children living with their parents in 2021 was 24 years, one year older than in 2011. 

The ONS attributed this shift to several factors, including rising housing prices, unemployment, and the provision of unpaid care (by both parent and child). Whilst the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns may have impacted the numbers of adult children living with parents, the rise in the age at which children leave the parental home was seen to be part of a longer-term continuing trend rather than a direct result of the pandemic. 

This trend was greatest in London where, in 2021, more than one in four (26.8 percent) of families had at least one adult child living with them. This compares to around one in five (19.3 percent) in the South West (the region with the lowest proportion), and 23.3 percent in Wales.  

The definition of “adult children” used by ONS does not include those in full-time education, but additional surveys have suggested that the proportion of university students living at home has increased from 20 percent to 33 percent since the coronavirus pandemic. This change in the residential situation of university students makes the recent changes regarding delaying the departure from the parental home even more marked.  

Leaving home in the past

Turning first to the information available in autobiographies, it would appear that leaving the parental home happened considerably earlier in the past than it does now. In 1800 Mary Ashford, the daughter of a London publican, left her parental home to become a domestic servant to a family in a banking house in the City of London. She was then aged 13. In 1795 Joseph Mayett, the son of a day labourer in the village of Quainton, Buckinghamshire, left home to be bound as a servant in husbandry to the farmer for whom his father also worked. Joseph was also aged 13 at the time.  

Like many of their contemporaries working in domestic or agricultural service, both Mary and Joseph remained in service for a considerable period of time, changing situations and employers on a frequent basis. Ashford’s initial employment at the banking house came to an end after just two months. This was followed by 11 different situations over the next 17 years. Mayett’s first stint as a farm servant lasted around six months, after which he served an additional 11 terms over a period of seven years.  

Ashford’s period of service was broken at the age of 30 when she married a shoemaker; Mayett’s at the age of 20 when he joined the local militia under the shadow of the war with Napoleon. For both, leaving the parental home proved to be a fundamental turning point in their life. Although the periods of service were occasionally broken by short and temporary returns to the parental home, for both the initial move marked a dramatic upheaval, one which fundamentally broke the residential bond with their parents.  

The experience of these two individuals was not exceptional. They can both be viewed in relation to the concept of life-cycle service, promoted by Campop co-founder Peter Laslett. Developing the earlier ideas of John Hajnal, the life-cycle service model suggests that across pre-industrial north-west Europe, marriage, and in turn, the process of household and family formation, was usually proceeded by a period of service outside of the parental home in order to acquire both skills and capital.

Whilst not universal, the importance of service in early modern England for the circulation of labour and the formation of new households is beyond doubt. It has been estimated that between 1574 and 1821 some 60 percent of those aged 15-24 were in service of some kind, with three-quarters of all servants being between these ages.  

This transfer of young labour between households in part helped to iron–out the effects of demographic chance, as well as transferring labour supply from poorer to richer households. Clearly, one impact of service was the large-scale departure of children from the parental home at a relatively early age. Yet the exact timing of this departure is uncertain. Laslett has suggested that in the early modern period young men might remain in service from between 12 and 20 years prior to marriage. The diary of the 17th-century Essex clergyman, Ralph Josselin, records that his seven surviving children left home to either enter service or to gain an education between the ages of 10 and 15.   

Using household listings for 21 preindustrial communities over the period 1599 to 1831, Richard Wall, a former Campop member, suggests that the mid- to late teens was ‘characterised by a mass movement from the parental home’, whilst also stressing the variance of experience. He concluded that movement from home was a ‘very gradual process, so that even in their early twenties as many as half of all children with parents still alive could be residing with them’.  

Measuring the age at which children leave home 

Young adults leaving home in their mid to late teens as part of the life-cycle service process began to break down in the 19th century, especially when agricultural service became less common. The graphs below, calculated from census data covering the period 1851 to 1911, plot the proportions of boys and girls, by age, living with neither parent – in effect, those living outside of the parental household.  

Whilst these graphs do not measure leaving home per se, the fact that the curves move progressively from left to right over time strongly suggests that leaving the parental home was becoming later, or being delayed, decade by decade. They also indicate that in this period girls left home earlier than boys.

Moving away from ones parents is not the only factor which may influence the shape of the curves in the figures above. If ones parents are both dead then one cannot live with them regardless of age or any desire to do so. This is one of the reasons why living with a parent is not universal even for the very young. The slow but progressive improvements in adult mortality in the second half of the 19th century are an important factor in explaining that for those aged under 10, a greater proportion are found living with parents from 1851 to 1911.   

Leaving home to work is not, of course, the only reason why children may not have been living with their parents. A relative few—boys more than girls—were sent away to schools, but rarely before the age of 10.

Some children may also have been sent to live with relatives, maybe at times when the mother was working or following the birth of a new addition to the family or an illness in the family. Such relocations may have been of a short-lived and temporary nature. However, in the period 1851 to 1911, the key break from the parental home most often came as a result of leaving home. 

The curves in the graphs can be used to calculate an indirect measure of leaving home, called the “singulate mean age at leaving home” (or SMAL). Nationally, this increased gradually from 18.9 for boys and 17.7 for girls in 1851, to 21.2 and 19.7, respectively, by 1911.

These figures are averages, but it is possible also to calculate a ‘take-off’ age, or the age at which the rate of leaving home started to change rapidly. This suggests that whilst the age of leaving home for girls became gradually later over the period, the process started early for girls. Even by 1911 girls started to leave home at 13 or 14, younger still in the 19th century, most usually for work in service. In contrast, for boys, departure from home was usually later and also a more gradual process for those under 16, and more so over time.    

Leaving home and getting married 

One of the most significant effects of the delay in leaving home during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was that the number of years adolescents and young men and women spent apart from their parents prior to establishing a home of their own diminished. This is shown visually in the graphs below, which contrast the experience of living with parents with that of living with a spouse for those aged under 35.

For both males and females, the gap between the lines narrows over time, indicating that for many, the time spent between living with one’s parent(s), leaving home, and subsequent marriage and starting a new home was narrowing—a trend which had most likely been taken place since the late 18th century, or earlier.  

Over time the average gap between leaving home and marriage shortened slightly faster for men in relation to women, especially in the third quarter of the 19th century. Thus, whilst the rise in the age at marriage over the period 1851 to 1911 was largely mirrored by later departure from the parental home, the latter outpaced the former. Overall, the time spent apart from family prior to marriage was reduced. Whilst the social consequences of this are difficult to determine, such a shift may have been influential in the dramatic decline of illegitimate fertility rates, which coincided with this change.  

The figure below captures the changing experience of those in their teens and early twenties. The percentage living away from family dropped significantly after 1851, especially in the early years of the 20th century. For males, the percentage living apart from their family and relatives at age 20 was halved between 1851 and 1911, dropping from 34 percent to 17 percent. For females the decline at age 20 was not as marked, but still important —from 37 percent to 27 percent —and matched by a similar decline at age 15, from 25 percent to 14 percent.  

Yet the biggest change in experience, perhaps one of the most important changes in terms of family life in the period, was those in their earlier teens who—as a result of decreased employment, increased schooling, delayed departure from the family home, and, in part, increased survival of their parents—remained part of the family of their childhood for longer – a trend which continues today.  

Further reading

• Day, J., ‘Leaving home in 19th century England and Wales: a spatial analysis’, Demographic Research, 39:4 (2018), 95-135.   
• Hajnal, J., ‘Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System’, in R. Wall, J, Robin and P. Laslett, (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 65-104. 
• Hill, B., Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996). 
• Kussmaul, A., Servants in Husbandry in Early Modem England (Cambridge, 1981). 
• Kussmaul, A., The Autobiography of Joseph Mayett of Quainton (1783-1839), Buckinghamshire Record Society (1986), 23. 
• Laslett, P., ‘Mean Household Size in England Since the Sixteenth Century’, in P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), 125-58. 
• Laslett, P., The World We Have Lost (Taylor & Francis, 2021). 
• Laslett, P., ‘The Institution of Service’, Local Population Studies, 40 (1983), 55-60. 
• Macfarlane, A., The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970). 
• Pooley, C. and J. Turnbull, ‘Leaving Home: The Experience of Migration from the Parental Home in Britain Since c. 1770’, Journal of Family History, 22 (1997), 390-424 
• Schürer, K., ‘Leaving Home in England and Wales, 1850-1920’, in F. van Poppel, M. Oris and J. Lee, eds, The road to independence. Leaving home in Eastern and Western societies, 16th-20th centuries (Bern-Bruxelles, 2003), 33-84. 
• Schürer, K., Garrett, E.M., Jaadla, H. and Reid, A., ‘Household and family structure in England and Wales (1851–1911): continuities and change’, Continuity and Change, 33:3 (2018), 365-411. 
• Wall, R., ‘Leaving home and the process of household formation in pre-industrial England’, Continuity and Change, 2:1 (1987), 77-101. 

Tags: age at marriage, family history, leaving home, servants, service

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