Still in the nest - The family and young adults in Germany

By way of introduction, a synopsis of empirical research on young people in Germany will be given to enable a better understanding of the statements that will be made in this article, particularly of the sets of data that will be used to verify the thesis-still in the nest-that is implied in the title. This will be followed by a presentation of demographic developments during the past 45 years, which will elucidate the quantitative importance of young people with respect to other age groups. Subsequently, the questions of when and why young people move out of the parental home and why some continue to live there will be tackled. The data analyzed in this article were collected in various distinctly different empirical surveys on the subject.