Youth Parental Emancipation in an Unequal Society: The Case of Mexico

The paper analyzes the housing transitions of young Mexicans from a social inequality perspective. Mexico is the most unequal society among OECD countries. The calendars of marriage and childbearing are significantly different across socioeconomic strata, with surprisingly low ages at marriage and first child among those coming from disadvantaged families. Migration (both internal and to the United States) has become a frequent event in the lives of young Mexicans seeking job opportunities. In this context, residential emancipation may follow very different patterns among youngsters coming from different social backgrounds.

The paper will look at these differences by characterizing emancipation in association with marriage and childbearing. Although these transitions are obviously related to emancipation, the association is not universal: many newly-wed sons and daughters remain living with their parents. Others move out before entering into marriage. Thus, a proper characterization of emancipation must take into consideration the different life course pathways that emerge from taking into consideration the occurrence, timing, and sequence of this transition in combination with other family events.

Once these patterns of emancipation are identified, I will analyze their incidence and determinants among socioeconomic strata, taking into consideration the association with trajectories in other domains, and specifically with occupational events/trajectories. The aim is to explore whether early occupational uncertainty relates to different emancipation pathways.

The analysis will be based on data from the EDER 2011, a recently released retrospective biographical survey that covers the educational, occupational, residential, and migration histories of 2,900 Mexicans of three birth cohorts. The survey reports the ages of occurrence of all the events considered in the analysis. It also includes a very complete module on family background, thus allowing a thorough exploration of the association between socioeconomic origins and emancipation.