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

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.