Rethinking Family Relationships

Abstract

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 relationship. Against traditional views of families as critical actors in the process of social reproduction 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 structures. We also draw on data from cohort 2 participants who left secondary school in 2006 to examine the experiences of these participants in terms of two central contemporary issues in social life: the rise and widespread nature of precarious labour and the crisis of housing affordability affecting in particular young adults. 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 new patterns of inequalities, dimensions that are shaping a new adulthood.