Leaving the nest is complicated, and if you are between the ages of 18 and 30, you will know that it is extremely difficult to become independent and leave your family home in Spain. Many factors affect this, such as salaries, housing prices, high rents, distrust in some contracts and even cultural reasons. But no, this is not just a reality in Spain.

And on this map we can see the average age at which young Europeans leave their parents’ home; This varies greatly between the north and south of the continent.

Earliest. The map prepared by Landgeist with the latest data from Eurostat shows us this fact, where countries such as Finland (21.4 years), Denmark (21.8 years) and Sweden (21.8 years) represent the lowest average. age. Young people leave home early, very early, but this is something that also happens in Norway (22.5 years old) or Estonia (22.8 years old).

We have talked about this phenomenon before in Xataka; The proportion of people aged 25 to 34 living with their parents in the northern region is very small (less than 5%). And further south this is a fact.

the lazy ones. This percentage of young people living with their parents increases as you move south. In Spain, this rate is close to 40 percent, but it is not a country where the nest is abandoned later. The average age at which we become independent is 30.4 years, and in Portugal and Italy it is 29.1 or 30 years respectively.

In the Balkans, the scenario is very different. According to these data, Montenegrin young people who take the cake leave their parents’ home at the age of 33.3. In North Macedonia, they leave their homes at 32.1 years old, and Croatians become independent at 31.8 years old. The average age in the central region of Europe is between 23 and 25, and there are several factors that explain this large difference between north and south.

Cultural factors. First, we cannot ignore the family and collective culture of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece or Croatia, as well as other countries in southern and eastern Europe. Young people tend to stay at home longer due to strong intergenerational bonds, the notion that young people support the family, and staying in the family home longer to reduce costs when they pursue higher education.

And economical. But beyond family ties, there is an irreparable link to the medieval era of emancipation: money. This idea of ​​family ties is almost romantic, but the reality is that in some countries it is complicated to find a job, leading to high rates of youth unemployment, so you cannot access housing and the result is economic dependence on parents. It has to.

In northern countries such as Sweden, Denmark or Finland, there are social policies that allow for earlier independence thanks to education subsidies (directly free in some universities) and more accessible housing. The labor market is also different, encouraging young people to leave home when they enter higher education or start working.

In any case, this is a crisis that seems to have no end and for which the rulers themselves are responsible, according to the young people of some of the most affected countries. Moreover, there is no hope for the situation to improve in the short term.

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