Search

The new and distinctive social and economic conditions that are explored in the chapters in this book demand new ways of conceptualising the role and significance of family relationships in young people’s lives, including viewing this support as a two-way stream and beyond financial realm to include emotional sustenance. Against traditional views of families as critical actors in the process of social repro-duction of inequalities or a youth transition approach that establishes a binary independence/dependence in youth-family relationships, this chapter extends the call for a more relational analysis of youth that includes their engagement with family to more fully understand how young people make their lives. We draw on longitudinal data from participants in cohort 1, that left school in 1991, to illustrate the relevance of family support against a background of declining institutional structure, and data from cohort 2 participants who left secondary school in 2006 to place the experiences of these participants against two central contemporary issues in social life: the rise and widespread of precarious labour and the crisis of housing affordability affecting in particular young adults. Further, we provide evidence of intergenerational practices of mutuality between cohort 2 participants and their parents. Ultimately, while these youth-family relationships show the complexity of transitions in late modernity and an interdependence and mutuality, they also bring into sharp relief the resilience of old and the generation of new patterns of inequalities, dimensions that are shaping a new adulthood.

Time and space are central to youth research. Transitions research investigates the movement from one status to another and often from one place to another. Cultural youth research investigates the symbolic practices of young people, practices that necessarily unfold over time and involve engagements in place and across space. This chapter introduces the most pressing temporal-spatial questions for youth research and the work in youth studies that addresses time and space. The chapter finishes by addressing the challenges for future research in this area. Conceptualizing time and space, and in particular the relationship between the two, will be important to youth researchers’ efforts to understand the increasingly global interaction of youth cultural practices, political movements, and forms of inequality.