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co-residential partnership. However, in late mid-life there are more
women living solo than men who have children outside the household.
Individuals with higher socio-economic status are also more likely to live
solo than those with lower status.
One may also wonder which factors underlie the fact that the Leaving
parental home type is more likely to be found in Portugal. This type pre-
dominantly concerns individuals belonging to the younger cohort (mean
age: 39 years old). Research results (Billari et al. 2001 ; Thévenon 2015 )
show that the share of individuals aged 15–19 not living with their par-
ents is about 20% in Portugal compared to 30% in Switzerland and 35%
in Lithuania. According to Thévenon ( 2015 ), the low coverage of hous-
ing benefit for young adults living outside the family home (as is the case
in Portugal) is the main explaining factor, followed by the low level of
unemployment benefits for young adults, especially those who are not in
education, employment, or training (NEET).
An average high rate of marriage (high in Portugal) or divorce (com-
paratively high in Lithuania) influences the stability of family arrange-
ments and may trigger alternative forms of parent–child co-residence
(Dronkers 2015 ). Indeed, divorce is directly involved in at least two types
of co-residence trajectories, namely Transition to lone parenthood and
Nesting one parent types. The former is typical of respondents who have
experienced their own divorce and is logically more frequent in the older
cohort (mean age: 50 years old), whereas the latter concerns the respon-
dents’ parental separation and is more likely to be found in the younger
cohort (mean age: 42 years old). Both types are more frequent in
Lithuania. Higher rates of divorce were measured in Lithuania in 1980,
1990, and 2000 (respectively 3.2, 3.4, and 3.1, compared to respectively
1.7, 2, and 1.5^4 in Switzerland and 0.6, 0.9, and 1.9 in Portugal—
Eurostat^5 ). This explains at least part of why the type Transition to lone
parenthood is more frequent in Lithuania than in Switzerland or Portugal.
In contrast to Portugal and Switzerland, Lithuania presents high divorce
rates from the 1970s onwards. According to Maslauskaitė and Baublytė
( 2015 ), gender differences are strong in this country where 30% of
women and 46% of men repartner within ten years after divorce. These
authors expect repartnering to be higher in the countries where the
J.-A. Gauthier et al.