Conclusions

            Though I originally set out to find the age at which a child is most able to leave his parental home and begin a successful life, I quickly realized that this would be an impossible number to find.  Not only does the “right age to leave the nest” vary between cultures, it varies to such a degree within cultures that I was forced to come to the conclusion that one number could not be reached.  However, I did find common threads throughout the cultures I explored that led to the decision to leave the home: education and marriage.  Though these are parallel to the decision to leave the parental home, the reasons for which these paths were chosen and the consequences of those paths were radically different between cultures.  In the United States, children who left in order to marry often did not become as successful as those who left to attend higher education.  In Brazil, however, many children choose to stay at home, in their city, and go to a university there, only deciding to leave the home upon entering marriage.  I was surprised to find in South Africa that even after a woman has had a child, sometimes out of wedlock, she is encouraged to go back to school in order to increase her economic importance and brideprice.  It was also interesting to note that South Korean children leave home not only to obtain a university education, but also to obtain a secondary education, sometimes thousands of miles from home.  There were distinct differences between marriage ages and who the postnuptial couple would live with.  In the United States, it is definitely a general practice to move out of the parental home if at all possible upon getting married.  However, sometimes in South Korea and parts of Africa this is not the case.  It was also very interesting to learn of the different initiation ceremonies associated with each country and culture and find that more complex societies, along with industrial and post-industrial societies, do not generally have many initiation ceremonies like smaller, kin based societies do. 

            Overall, I found that making this website was very instructive and enlightening about how different cultures shape important times in everyone’s life, such as the choice to leave the parental home, get married, start a family, etc.  Though I was not able to answer my original question, which pertained to the age at which it was best to leave the parental home, I was able to find the determinants that shape that life changing decision.