> A granny flat or mother-in-law suite would be cheating. It's a separate apartment. Your parents are your neighbors not your room-mates anymore.

That's correct. It gives some semblance of independence. My point with that one is that even if US residents were inclined to "cheat", current zoning laws in most municipalities makes building additions, or expanding to duplexes and triplexes illegal. Other things like, requiring onsite parking, setbacks, not allowing mixed-use zones impacts the ability to have affordable housing.

These laws are changing. Portland recently expanded the zoning laws to allow many of those. The activists who got that through campaigned under the banner of "walkability", but it was a lot more than that. Other cities may follow as they see how well Portland does.

> Education in other countries is far more strict and regimented than the US. Especially Asia.

I was born in Taiwan and was raised mostly in the US, so I have had a taste of what that strictness is. A lot of the structure that the US compulsory school system is based on, took their playbook from the way the Indian caste system educate their children. That educational system was there before the industrialization took that method for its own use.

To be clear, when we're talking about "education", we're talking about "compulsory education" that is part of the predominant paradigm of the modern world. Prior to the compulsory educational laws, the US had a literacy rate of 99%, in a nation of farmers. Kids were taught at home or in one-room schools. It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic. The contrast between that and our current generation of algorithm-driven conspiracy theories is stark.

What I just talked about and more is in John Taylor Gatto's book.

There are alternative models showing up here. Alaska does not put all the kids all in the same grade. There are too many kids in the bush. Instead, kids learn each subject at the competency level independently. A kid might be at 8th grade reading level for example, and still working through 3rd grade math. Carol Sandford's work on education is much more radical -- no cirriculum, no teachers, no grading. Instead, capabilities like critical thinking are developed, and the kids are taught a framework in which they evaluate their contributions and actions. The kids decide what they want to contribute, and then they figure out how they are going to do it.

> I've always thought the main driver for leaving home is instinctive, basically teenage rebelliousness. If there's cultural "programming" going on, it is just as likely to be in the societies that overcome these drives and keep children subservient to their parents.

Adolescence is a distinct phase that is studied by psychologists during the modern era. It didn't really exist pre-industrialization, pre-compulsory schooling. It used to be, around the pre-teen age, kids were apprenticed and treated as inexperienced young adults. Some cultures had rites of passages that definitively marks when childhood ends, adulthood begins, in a way that the whole community acknowledged. I suppose in the modern era, the ability to be financially independent from the parents a sign of adulthood.

Compounding that is better nutrition, and perhaps, the way our food is grown (hormones), and artificial lighting all contributes towards an earlier age of pubescence. Modern kids' physical maturity are happening at a younger age at the same that the length of time before they are treated as a full adult gets extended.