‘She started to get pretty concerned’: young men’s relationships with parents through senior schooling and beyond

ABSTRACT

The field of youth sociology has been challenged to reconsider the role of parenting in the lives of young adults. This paper presents a multiple-case study investigation into young men’s transitions from school into further education in an Australian context. We will argue that relationships with parents are materially, socially and emotionally salient throughout the period during which young men move out of adolescence and into young adulthood during their final year of senior schooling and beyond. In considering how the young men constituted their identities in the context of family relationships, we will highlight the dynamic interplay between three relational identities: dependent, independent and interdependent. We show that a main locus of tension was the negotiation of power and agency in the representation of self in relation to parents, specifically in the context of a period in which educational achievement was highly emphasised.

KEYWORDS:

• Young men
• schooling
• further education
• parental involvement
• discourse
• narrative
• relationships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sue Nichols is Associate Professor of Education in the Centre for Research in Education, University of South Australia. She has studied gender and parenting as aspects of the social context of education from the early years through to young adulthood. Her research employs discourse analytic, ethnographic, case study and narrative methods.

Garth Stahl, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy and Sociology at the School of Education at the University of South Australia. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform. Of particular interest is the exploration of counternarratives to neoliberalism around 'value' and 'respectability' for working-class youth.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hawke Research Institute.