Youth these days

This article in The Atlantic:

The Real Reason Young Adults Seem Slow to ‘Grow Up’

It’s not a new developmental stage; it’s the economy.

is a good read, and makes an interesting case that the age at which young people move out of home and start living independently is very much determined by a nation's economic situation at the time, and that the boom times of the 1950's made it unusually easy for American youth to start marrying earlier and living away from their parents.   So kids now taking a much longer time to leave home is more a return to previous historical norms.  

Seems valid enough, although by concentrating on economics, it doesn't take into account other factors that help account for young adults staying longer with the parents.  I'm thinking of the change in attitudes to sexual relationships, whereby in the West it is now considered completely unexceptional for a single, young adult child to have their girlfriend/boyfriend either live with them in the parents house, or at least stay over.   I'd be pretty sure that before that change, moving out of home, at least to a independent single life, was often motivated by wanting an active sex life that was hidden from the parents.   (I guess it would still be a motivating factor in many cases, because even if parents shrug shoulders about their adult kids sex lives now, it's not as if all adult children want their parents around their partner, or vice versa.  But still, it certainly happens in a not insubstantial number of households, and it is perhaps hard for younger folk to appreciate how scandalous this would have been in the average, even non-religious, household before, say, the 1970's?)