The Road to Independence: Leaving Home in Western and Eastern Societies, 16th-20th Centuries

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 2 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 The Road to Independence: Leaving Home in Western and Eastern Societies, 16th-20th Centuries van Poppel, Frans and Oris, Michel and Lee, James (2004). New York: Peter Lange; 450 pages. $69.95. ISBN 0820459496. The rich set of papers in this edited volume focus on leaving home and the changing place of that transition on the “road to independence” in a series of European countries as well as Japan and the United States. We are shown historical examples of leaving the parental home at ages that range from the early teens to the late twenties, making the transition out of the parental home either very early on the “road to independence” or very late, a matter either of youth or full adulthood. Hence, the road to independence is far from straight, and these papers provide more a set of tantalizing clues than a map. This book is a product of the European Science Foundation Network which held a workshop on “Household and Community Dynamics: A Eurasian Approach to Mobility in Past Societies,” in June, 1999, at which these papers were presented. The editors organized the papers into three sections, two that focus on patterns in nuclear family societies and stem family societies, respectively, and one that focuses more broadly on strategies, determinants, and metaphors. They also include a detailed and very useful introduction. It would have been nice, however, to have some sections on the discussions at the workshop. By not contextualizing the papers within the workshop discussions, the papers do not appear to address each other and thus do not hang together well. Particularly disconcerting is the disjuncture between the papers of Schürer and of Pooley and Turnbull, each of which addresses change in age at leaving home in Britain. Pooley and Turnbull find a decline in age at leaving home between 1750 and 1930 from the late to the early 20s for both men and 336 women, while Schürer found an increase in age at leaving home between1851 and 1921 from about 17 to 20. Schürer describes his methods in detail but the authors of the other paper do not, making these differences impossible to reconcile. Further, whether because the authors were primarily historians or primarily Europeans, there is little reference to work in other disciplines and geographic areas. In addition to my own work on changes in leaving home in the U.S. between 1920 and 1987 (e.g., Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1994), there is a parallel study of Canada (Zhao et al. 1993) that is not covered. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained from a careful study of these papers, making this book very useful for scholars and advanced students of family history. Particularly valuable is the focus on separate communities, so that kin can be linked. In most cases, analyses are based on an impressive base of cases, using sophisticated statistical techniques. This allows quite complex theoretical tests. An important focus of many of the papers is on the “nuclear hardship hypothesis” of Peter Laslett, which posits that more complex family systems (e.g., stem) were more efficient than nuclear family systems in preindustrial times in their ability to buffer the vicissitudes family members encounter as a result of poverty, death, and disability. Drib shows that in mid-nineteenth century southern Sweden, the migration of children away from the parental household was used as an integrated part of a family strategy to deal with uncertainty in the short run. This perhaps extreme solution raises an important issue, which is mirrored in current arguments that the nuclear family with only one wage earner is also a high-risk structure (Oppenheimer 2003). The question of parental death and the remarriage of the surviving parent also receives interesting attention. Both transitions are clearly linked with early leaving home. In some contexts this is treated as positive, interpreted as showing that young adults’ access to parental resources on their death allows them to marry young. Others argue the contrary, 337 attributing the departure to the fact that there are fewer resources available, whether from the remaining parent or because of the different priorities...

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