ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with what have been called contingencies in the process of becoming established in the labor force and moving toward one's adult position in the society's stratification structure. Increasingly, young adults have been living independently before marriage. Early investigations of leaving home reflected the common assumption that either all children left home to get married, or that children only really left when they married. The chapter shows that many of the cohort members had entered heterosexual relationships through cohabitation rather than marriage, and that kind of relationship was also more common for women than for men. While considering the role marriage plays in the transition to adulthood and the early social mobility experiences of the National Child Development Study cohort, however, it is also necessary to take into account two other facets of the process of becoming independent of the family of orientation—cohabitation and parenthood.
