Kidults in the making? How does the parent-child relationship quality impact home-leaving decision: insights from graphical models

This longitudinal analysis investigates the impact of the quality of the mother-child and father-child relationship on the home-leaving decision. Leveraging retrospective data from the 2017 Wave 7 of SHARELIFE, we conceived two plausible causal mechanisms for the two dyads via Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). We applied the Backdoor Criterion to select control variables and employed Discrete-Time Survival Analysis to estimate the effect of the mother-child and father-child relationship quality on the decision to leave the parental nest for individuals aged between 15-49 years old. Results reveal significant differences in the impact of mother-child and father-child relationship quality on the transition to independent living. Constructive mother-child relationships may not lead to delayed launching, and the probability of nest leaving increases as the relationship quality decreases. Conversely, the father-child relationship does not appear to be central in terms of effect size and significance. These results led us to hypothesise a transition-specific impact of the mother-child relationship on home-leaving dynamics.