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This article examines the emotional work that young adult care leavers perform during their transition to adulthood. It is based on 30 biographical interviews with young adults (formerly) placed in care. Among researchers, social workers and policy makers, there is a need to understand what young people do about their feelings when they have been exposed to bereavement, abuse, neglect and conflict. Furthermore, it is important to understand how feelings associated with growing up with hard times impact young adults' everyday lives. To understand what young adults who have been placed in care "think" and "do" about their feelings in relation to their birth parents, I draw on Hochschild's model of "deep acting" and "surface acting" [Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551-575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049; Hochschild, A. R. (1983). "The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling." University of Chicago Press]. The study reveals that these young adults constantly engage in emotion work to manage feelings towards their birth parents that do not fit within social guidelines for how to feel about one's parents. These "misfitting" feelings include hate, anger, disgust and distrust but also love and admiration towards the birth parents who neglected and abused them. Managing these feelings leaves the young adults in moments of "pinch or discrepancy" that they must act on to successfully transition to adulthood.

Mixed methods longitudinal studies continue to be rare, yet have potential for transcending the limits of qualitative and quantitative paradigms. This article compares the life stories of 47 young people generated from a cohort study of 6000 children born in 1995. The cases were sampled through an association between two variables--drug use and leaving school early--generating a four-field table. Comparing the cases within and across each table cells, we question the 'black box' logic that underpins the assumption that cannabis smoking is consequential for educational success. Moving into a qualitative paradigm we reconceptualise the cases as butterflies captured in a net and work deductively to understand the species captured. Culminating with an analysis of a single case over time, we argue that narrative approaches are the starting point for understanding subsequent social action, providing a basis for larger scale quantitative modeling.

Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, ‘Peripheral Denmark’. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions.We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of ‘stuckness’ (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of ‘stillness’ (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of ‘reflexive stayers’ captures these young people’s lived experiences of ‘stillness’ and ‘stuckness’ and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adverse childhood experiences have negative outcomes for children, yet previous research suggests the independent effect of parental alcohol problems is inconsistent. Objectives: Our aim was (1) to compare educational attainment among Danish and Finnish youth with parental alcohol problems and (2) to study the associations between parental alcohol problems and children's educational attainment in these two Nordic welfare states. Data and methods: Administrative longitudinal data on children born in 1991 in Finland (n = 64,696) and Denmark (n = 64,138) and their biological parents. The children were followed until their 21st birthdays. We applied a mediation analysis to investigate how the association between parental alcohol problems and children's educational attainment is mediated by four indicators for poor socioeconomic family background (low parental education, long-term economic distress, psychiatric disorders, and living in a non-intact family). Results: At age 20 years, Finnish children were more likely to complete their education than their Danish peers. Young adults with parental alcohol problems faced early school leaving more frequently in both countries compared with their peers, but the relative risk was higher in Finland. In both countries, long-term economic distress mediated the highest proportion of the effect of alcohol problems (39% in Denmark and 34% in Finland). Low parental education and psychiatric disorders mediated part of the effect, but not to the same degree as economic distress. Conclusions: Ensuring education for children with parental alcohol problems is a key to improving their long-term outcomes in different life domains. Consequently, healthcare, social work and education sectors should prioritise advancing education among these children in order to prevent their exclusion from education and labour markets, and they should cooperate closely in doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we engage critically with how metaphors have been used in sociological youth studies, including a turn to new metaphors that capture the foreclosure of futures and experiences of waiting, delay and non-institutional temporalities. Drawing on the resources of queer theory we challenge the developmentalism that underpins youth studies, employing notions of the impasse and growing sideways to capture the open-endedness of young adult lives. Working with data from a qualitative longitudinal study of Danish youth, we focus on how 47 young people responded to an invitation to talk about and through an object that represented the last three years of their lives. These rich accounts can be understood as examples of Paul Riceour's 'metaphoric discourse', characterised by the simultaneity of 'is' and 'is not'. The article first offers a schema of the biographical objects (trophies, hobbies, mortal, connective and protest) that captures the work of 'being in time' for young adults, mapping this onto the formal and informal markers of adulthood. We then engage with participants' own metaphorical thinking in greater depth – suggesting that the paradoxical metaphors that emerge from their talk can expand how we understand the struggle for maturity. The metaphor of open-endedness is offered as a hybrid term, allowing us to look in two directions at once: capturing and comparing transitions as part of a project of social justice, while also recognising the limits of such frameworks for understanding the experiences of a new generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time of heightened international debate about youth precarity, how do we understand and support transitions to adulthood for people who have been in care? This paper reports on a qualitative longitudinal study of 75 young adults (aged 16–32 years) from Norway, Denmark, and England. All had been in care during childhood and at the time of their recruitment to the study all were in education, employment or training. Against the context of a literature largely focused on transitions specific to 'leaving care', our analysis addresses aspects of early adulthood which are not specific to being care experienced; some (such as romantic break-ups, or moving home) might be considered normative, whilst others (such as changing course or dropping out of university) are less common. Cross-national analysis shows how care and wider welfare systems intersect with informal networks in everyday lives, functioning to scaffold young people, or to exacerbate precarity, as they navigate biographical transitions in early adulthood. The research shows the importance of developing socially and culturally located biographical accounts of 'transition' that recognise the complexities, uncertainties and essential interdependence of everyday lives and emerging adulthoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To examine young people's main motive for pre-drinking in the United Kingdom, how much they drink on an event-specific night out, and whether motives or socioeconomic status (particularly their income level) explain the alcohol quantities they drink. Methods: Multilevel logit and Poisson models were used on a survey of 628 people (aged 18-35) conducted on-site in 26 bars, clubs and pubs in four cities and towns. Results: Young males drink on average 9.8 and females 7.4 standard units of alcohol before a night out. Saving money is the most prevalent motive for pre-drinking. Although lower income levels cannot explain whether a young person will pre-drink on an event-specific night out, young people's income level and their motives explain the quantities they consume. Lower-earning males who pre-drank to save money consumed larger quantities of alcohol at home and lower-earning females also pre-drank larger quantities either because they wanted to get out of control or because they wanted to be social. Conclusions: Prevention strategies likely to be effective in reducing the alcohol quantities that young people pre-drink should take into account both socioeconomic status and motives for pre-drinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between the drinking habits of Danish adolescents and the upbringing ideals and alcohol rules of their parents. It is based on three different data sets: a survey of 2,000 Danish young people born in 1989, a survey with the parents of these young people, and two waves of focus group interviews (in all 28) with adolescents aged 14 to 16. The study demonstrates that there is a sharp contrast between the views of the adolescents and the findings from the two surveys. Although the young people themselves are of the opinion that parental control has no positive effect and that drinking habits within reasonable limits can best be developed through trial and error, the survey data reveal a strong relationship between parents' attitudes and rules and their children's binge drinking. The more lenient the parents' attitudes and rules are, the more the children tend to binge drink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adverse childhood experiences have negative outcomes for children, yet previous research suggests the independent effect of parental alcohol problems is inconsistent., Objectives: Our aim was (1) to compare educational attainment among Danish and Finnish youth with parental alcohol problems and (2) to study the associations between parental alcohol problems and children's educational attainment in these two Nordic welfare states., Data and Methods: Administrative longitudinal data on children born in 1991 in Finland ( n = 64,696) and Denmark ( n = 64,138) and their biological parents. The children were followed until their 21st birthdays. We applied a mediation analysis to investigate how the association between parental alcohol problems and children's educational attainment is mediated by four indicators for poor socioeconomic family background (low parental education, long-term economic distress, psychiatric disorders, and living in a non-intact family)., Results: At age 20 years, Finnish children were more likely to complete their education than their Danish peers. Young adults with parental alcohol problems faced early school leaving more frequently in both countries compared with their peers, but the relative risk was higher in Finland. In both countries, long-term economic distress mediated the highest proportion of the effect of alcohol problems (39% in Denmark and 34% in Finland). Low parental education and psychiatric disorders mediated part of the effect, but not to the same degree as economic distress., Conclusions: Ensuring education for children with parental alcohol problems is a key to improving their long-term outcomes in different life domains. Consequently, healthcare, social work and education sectors should prioritise advancing education among these children in order to prevent their exclusion from education and labour markets, and they should cooperate closely in doing so., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interests: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2020.)