Home-leaving and Parenthood : Timing of home-leaving and the relation to childbearing behavior in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Objective: This thesis examines the timing of having the first child in relation to when Swedish men and women leave the parental home. The aim is to explain if any childbearing trends can be detected based on whether one leaves the parental home at a younger or older relative age than the current age norms. The timing of having the first child might be affected by either a speed up/slow down effect (one continues to experience other stages of adulthood faster or slower relative to people of the same age) or an age-norm effect (one tries to counter-act deviation from the home-leaving norm by speeding up or delaying childbearing to align with people of the same age).   Method and Data: Event history analysis is applied using a multivariate piece-wise constant hazard model. The data comes from Swedish register data based on records of the entire Swedish population between 1 January 1953 and 31 December 2012.   Results: The results indicate that Swedish women who leave the parental home younger than the norm run a greater risk of having their first child sooner after leaving the parental home relative to women of the same age. Swedish men who leave the parental home younger than the norm, on the other hand, run a greater risk of having the first child later after leaving the parental home relative to men of the same age. Swedish men who leave the parental home later than the norm run a greater risk of having their first child sooner after leaving the parental home relative to men of the same age while the opposite is true for women. However, the effects of timing of leaving the parental home are relatively small, which can be explained by the very long and stable mean durations found. The peak durations of intensities, i.e. number of years between leaving the parental home and having the first child, for men and women can be found after 10–12 years. The peak durations of intensities are remarkably similar between the genders.   Conclusion: Swedish women who leave the parental home earlier than the norm are more likely to experience a speed-up effect in terms of childbearing and a slow down effect when leaving the parental home later than the norm. Thus, women stick to breaking the normative timing of the life course events once they have started. Swedish men, on the other hand, are more likely to try and catch up with age norms and instead postpone having the first child when leaving the parental home earlier than the norm and speed up having a child when leaving the parental home later than the norm. Men are thus more likely to time having children with men of the same age.