Is moving out at 18 an artifact of WWII
Q: Is moving out at 18 an artifact of WWII? Someone shared some social media posts from some Thai and Pakistani kids who were flummoxed by the independence expected of them while in America for grad school because it was ‘normal in their cultures to live and help out at home in early adulthood, often until marriage.’
A Historian’s Take: “No – the idea of moving out at 18 is not an artifact of WWII. Or, to put it another way, events or conditions that happened between 1939 and 1945 did not cause young people to suddenly leave home at 18. The idea that a young person would leave their parents’ home had been established long before then. ‘Normal’ is a complicated, usually misleading, word to describe patterns among young people in history. That is, what’s true for one group of young adult Americans isn’t necessarily true for another group. The generational patterns among young adult Black Americans whose ancestors were brought to America through chattel slavery look different than young white men who have access to generational wealth which are different than Indigenous young adults. It took massive resistance from young disabled people to expand the social safety net to include them and the support they need(ed) to live independently. Etc.
“This does not accurately reflect patterns across history. In the early 1800s, thousands of unmarried women between the ages of 16ish and 24ish left their homes on the east coast to travel South and West to work as schoolteachers. Their housing situation ranged from living with a local family, in a room attached to a schoolhouse, to communal living. These young women didn’t have to fight against social norms to move away from their parents; instead, there was a deliberate campaign led by advocates for public schools to shift social norms such that it became acceptable for young unmarried women – mostly white, but not always – to leave her home and live independently (while “fulfilling her natural obligation to the next generation” – more on that here.) Similar movement could be seen among young men (and women, mostly white, but not always) before the 1860s who followed the sentiment of, ‘go west, young man.’ This isn’t to say all white young adults living in the Northeast left home to head West or South, only that it wasn’t uncommon and a young person interested in doing such a thing may have faced some pressure from their parents to not go but the conditions were such that it wouldn’t necessarily be seen as uncommon or as aberrant behavior.