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The article discusses the transition to adulthood from leaving home to returning home in Australia. Living at homes with parents is common occurrence in the lives of today's young adults. This can be because they have not left the home, or because they have left and returned. Drawing on data from a survey, this article explores the role of traditional rites of passage to adulthood. The article first describes the stages which people in their twenties had reached at the time of interview. It then examines the different factors contributing to the patterns of leaving home and returning home. In the survey, 20% of young adults had spent some time in a one-parent family before the age of 18, and 80 per cent had grown up in a two-parent family. Those who had spent some of their childhood in a one-parent family were more likely than those from a two-parent family to have set out on the pathways towards marriage, children and a mortgage in their early to mid twenties. By their late twenties, 40% had a child, just under half had a mortgage, a quarter had both, and a third had neither.

This article reports that the 1996 divorce figures in Australia showed a rise in the age specific divorce rate to the highest level for more than a decade. The annual rate at which children under 18 years have experienced the divorce of their parents, over the period since 1976, is shown in the article. The article depicts the numbers of children aged 0-17 years in each year whose parents divorced, expressed as a rate for all children under 18, and is referred to as the child specific rate of parental divorce. One of the consequences of the divorce of parents is, of course, the creation of a one-parent family. Hence the observable difference in growth between children impacted by divorce and children in one-parent families suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that children in one-parent families are more frequently being drawn from sources other than the divorce of parents. The second possibility is that a lone parent is spending longer in a one-parent family because of the slowdown of exit factors.