The Transition to Adulthood in Cambodia

Three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime (KRR) in January 1979, analysis of contemporary Cambodian society can still hardly be free of references to that period. The following baby-boom induced large variations in cohort size, and the political, economic, and social context in which these cohorts transitioned to adulthood were also vastly different from that of their elders. In this paper, we analyze the transition to adulthood of those aged 12 to 24 years at the time of the 1998 census. Our objective is first to describe some of the key transitions from school to work, from parental to independent household, from single to married, and to parenthood. Within the limitations of cross-sectional data, we also make an attempt to qualify the transition to adulthood along key dimensions and to relate it to the contextual structure. Finally, we use longitudinal that might not be representative at the national level to further study the transitions from parental home to own (or marital) home.