Leaving the parental home represents a milestone in the transition to adulthood, as it often coincides with taking up major adult roles. Reaching this milestone off-time could diminish the well-being of young adults since they do not comply with the normative ages defining the ‘‘right’’ time to leave home. Using rich prospective panel data spanning over thirty years from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008) and Understanding Society (2009-2021), we employ fixed-effects regression models to test whether young people's life satisfaction is causally related to transitioning off-time from the parental home. Somewhat contrary to the ‘failure to launch’ narrative, we do not find that transitioning off-time leads to a decrease in life satisfaction. Rather, delaying the transition increases life satisfaction by a small amount. Further, we find that among those who had left the parental home, returning to living with their parents reduces life satisfaction.
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Palumbo et al. (2024) studied this question.
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