On the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the intention to leave the parental home

With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic all over Europe during the first months of 2020, most of the European governments imposed restrictive measures to people mobility and physical distance (the lockdown), which severely impacted on the economic activities and performance of many countries. Thus, the health emergency turned rapidly into in an economic crisis. The Covid-19 crisis in Europe increased the uncertainty about the economic recovery and the end of the health emergency. This situation is supposed to have conditioned individuals’ life course path with the effect of inducing people to postpone or to abandon many life plans. This paper aims to explore whether the rise of health emergency due to the Covid-19 has delayed or vanished young people intention to leave the parental home during the 2020 in five European countries: Italy, Germany, France, Spain and UK. Using data from an international survey from the “Youth Project”, carried out by the Toniolo Institute of Advanced Studies, this paper implements ordered logistic models in order to investigate the determinants of a possible revision of the choice of leaving the parental home for a representative sample of 6,000 respondents aged 18 to 34, interviewed between March and April 2020. A special focus has been pointed on the Italian case, because of being the first European country to be strongly hit by the pandemic and because of the already economic vulnerable conditions of its young population. Results reports that Italy is the country with the highest rate of downward revisions of the intentions of leaving the nest. In particular, having negative expectations about changes in the individual’s and family’s future income is a key predictor of the choice of abandoning the purpose of leaving the parental home across Europe. However, the vulnerability of the category of temporary workers arises especially in Italy: young people with precarious jobs seems to be the most prone to negatively revise their intentions of leaving, even compared with those not working.