I think the amount that you see this phenomenon depends on your location (as well as age and other factors).

I suppose I'm seeing this from the other end since I'm in the moving out phase myself. I get to move every four months so, while I have only been in 3 different places so far this is what I see:

Note: Highschool has gone an extra year here: until students are 18 or 19. This has been phased out in the past few years. Also, in Canada, the law and such decides that people are fully adult and allowed to do everything adults can do at 19. We can vote at 18.

At home, anyone intending to get any kind of education after highschool has to go away to school. It's at least an hour and a half drive to the nearest college or university and no one in their right mind wants to drive that in winter to arrive for an 8:30 class. So people go away. If they don't go away they usually get jobs. No matter how apathetic they are, or how over-protective their parents are, no one really wants to either be, or have, a bored 19 year old sitting around the house. This means that these people tend to have some money and money goes farther in small towns. These people can, and do, move out. How quickly they move out depends on how well they get along with their parents.

Of those who do go off to school there are at least 2 catagories: those in a 2 year college diploma program and those in a 4 (or more) year university degree program.

Those in 4 year programs don't come back to live with their parents. There aren't a great number of jobs requiring university in small towns and I guess 4 years of being forced to live on your own is enough to make living at home seem less than desirable.

It's those the take 2 year college programs that seem to hang around forever. A considerable number of them can, and do, get jobs in the area, move back in with their parents, and just kind of stay there. I can't really fathom why. Likely they have some debts to pay off, maybe two years is just long enough to see how much easier it is to live at home but not to feel like home is too small.

Now, the university that I go to is one that pulls a large partion of it's student population from outside of it's immediate area. There aren't that many people who live at home while they go there. Most of them come from too far away. There are no parents there and the university wouldn't tell our parents anything even if they wanted to know, even if we wanted them to know. We have to tell them ourselves. That's the policy. It was probably set up because people ask. I do know of one strange guy who brought his mother to meet his professors but he was the exception.

Third, I am currently in a pretty large city for a work term. Here no one seems to move out. I'm attending a church group that I was told was for college and careers aged people but every last one of them still lives at home. Not one of them had the slightest idea of how to cook something so simple as a stir fry. I was somewhat startled. You would think, in a city where people can go places on public transit at a relatively early age and do not rely on parents to drive every time they want to go to a movie for example, people would be more independent not less.

But maybe that's the reason. Maybe it's easier to live with your parents when you have the option of hopping on a bus and going somewhere. There's no pressing reason to get more independence. I know the cost of housing is much higher here than at home so that could be another factor.

For myself, my parents try to force me to be independent. It was always assumed that I would be going away to school but my mother used to say, "If you're still living here after you finish highschool you're doing your own laundry." I was given to understand that if I was still around a few years after that they'd start charging rent. My parents do make significant financial contributions to my education and living expenses but nowhere near enough to cover it all. They ask about my grades but I don't have to tell them. I occasionally go galavanting all by myself but I can still go home and cry on their shoulders when I need to.

Rivikah

Now if I could only come up with 500 more words for that work report...