Moving Back to “Mamma”? Divorce and Intergenerational Co-Residence in Sweden

Marco Albertini, Università di Bologna
Michael Gahler, Stockholm University

Studies on intergenerational relations have provided abundant empirical evidence showing that while parental divorce negatively affects parent-child relations, children’s divorce prompts parental support. This finding is common to all western European societies, but what is generally maintained is that support strategies follow prevalent social norms and thus it is expected that a large quota of divorced children in southern Europe go back living with their parents, whereas most of the divorced children in Nordic countries obtain social and economic support both from non-resident parents and the welfare state. However, preliminary analyses based on the SHARE data contradict this expectation. Using Swedish registers data the paper aims at investigating if, and to what extent, children’s divorce in Sweden has an impact on the likelihood of intergenerational co-residence. Preliminary results confirm that there is a positive and strong marginal effect of children's divorce on the likelihood of co-residing with parents.