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live longer spells in partial independence; for instance, they may have a
residence of their own while being fully financed by their parents. This
new form of interdependency is associated with the emergence of adoles-
cence as a specific life stage on the one hand and with a general pluraliza-
tion of individual life courses on the other hand (Galland 1991 , 2003 ).
The global changes presented above contributed to the emergence of a
wide debate about how the process of life course de-standardization
affects the school-to-work transition and family formation conjointly or
separately (Brückner and Mayer 2005 ).
For about four decades, there has been increasing interest among life
course sociologists in considering individual lives in a holistic perspec-
tive, taking into account the interdependencies existing between the
multiple roles individuals hold simultaneously in various social spheres,
such as co-residence and occupation (Elder et al. 2003 ). Considering
with whom individuals live over their life is a central indicator to simul-
taneously observe how household members change over time and which
family stages and transitions they are going through (Levy and Widmer
2013 ). It has been shown that among the diversity of co-residence pat-
terns that are found across different contexts and populations, there is
a dominant, standardized one characterized by a stable stay in a two-
parent family until about age 20, followed by two brief stages, the first
of solo living and the second of conjugal life, ending up in a long and
stable spell of parenthood from the late twenties onwards (Gauthier
et al. 2009 ; Widmer and Gauthier 2013 ; Ramos et al. 2017 ). However,
changes in divorce and fertility rates create new opportunities to experi-
ence mid-life adulthood. As briefly sketched above, the ways in which
life trajectories unfold—their likelihood to get standardized or indi-
vidualized— also depend on macro-level conditions such as the labour
market characteristics and the type, direction, and intensity of welfare
state policies (Mayer 2001 ; Van de Velde 2008 ). For the time being, the
resulting effects of these multidimensional and multilevel structuring
factors of adulthood dynamics remain largely unknown and have to be
consistently addressed.
J.-A. Gauthier et al.