While everyone expected the number of young people moving home with their parents to continually rise, new data from the 2011 Census released Wednesday morning found that number has leveled off over the past five years.

Approximately 42% of the more than 4.3 million young people between the ages of 20 to 29 lived in their parents’ home in 2011, either because they never left it over the past five years or because they came home after living somewhere else, Statistics Canada said.

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But perhaps a greater explanation lies in the shrinking size of family, said Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family.

“One of the things about it leveling off is our families are actually smaller,” she said. “This is the first generation of 20-year-olds where we’ve got only one or two children in the household and we’re not going to see the same kind…