Leaving Home in a Peasant Society: Economic Fluctuations, Household Dynamics and Youth Migration in Southern Sweden, 1829-1866

This book deals with the process of children leaving home and its interactions with the household economy in preindustrial society. A theoretical model of leaving home is outlined and then analyzed multivariately, using event-history analysis of a longitudinal micro-level dataset for a sample of parishes in western Scania, Sweden, for the period 1829-1866. The empirical results show that the household context regarding demand for household labor, the level of family dependency and the individual's position within the household played important roles in explaining differences between children in the age at leaving home for the first time. Furthermore, by using new series of local harvest yields and grain prices, the effect of short-term economic fluctuations on the timing of leaving home is analyzed. The general picture that emerges from the analysis is one of great variety, in which the effects differ according to age and gender, as well as position in the household and social status.
The results show the importance of both the leaving home process in understanding the functioning of the preindustrial household economy, and the household and family in determining leaving home for individual children.