Reconciling Ideals of Autonomy and Parental Influence. Young People’s Stories of Educational Choice

Abstract

Young people’s room for autonomy and independent life choices is challenged by intensive parenting practices and ambiguous ideals underpinning the youth-parent relationship. In this article, we explore how young people make sense of and relate to parental influence as they are about to make choices of higher education. Through Foucauldian discourse analyses of interviews with 23 young men and women (19 years) in Oslo, Norway, this study sheds light on how the youth reconciled ideals of self-expression and self-determination with perceived parental influence. We demonstrate how their ‘autonomous self’ is portrayed as ‘accountable’ and ‘malleable’, to allow for parent’s influence through their subject positions as ‘advisor’ and ‘socialising agent’. These subject positions overlap with discourses of intensive parenting previously described as disciplining the modern parent. We discuss whether youth contribute to the cultivation of ‘the intensive parent’, and the potential the ideal of autonomy holds for conformity to normalizing powers.

Keywords:

• Youth autonomy
• parental involvement
• educational choice
• discourse analysis

Introduction

What is commonly regarded as a good educational choice for young people in the Nordic countries is one that is made autonomously and independent from overt parental influence, based on their own self-knowledge and individual personal interests (Grytnes 2011; Hegna and Smette 2016). However, research has demonstrated that parents are highly involved in and instrumental for young people’s educational trajectories (e.g. Aarseth 2017; Butler and Muir 2017;David et al. 2003; Dermott and Pomati 2016; Mørch, Pultz and Stroebaek 2018; Ule, Živoder, and du Bois-Reymond 2015; Vincent and Ball 2007). Thus, the role of modern youth-parent relationships in young people’s educational choice potentially rests on the crossing ideals of youth autonomy on the one hand and parental involvement on the other.

While focusing on the US and the UK, Lee et al. (2014) describe a global turn in parenting cultures towards intensified parenting, which requires parents to be highly involved in their children’s lives. Although this modern shift in parenting is described as originating in middle class cultures (Hays 1996; Lareau 2011), intensified norms of parenting now form generalised expectations of good parenting (Dinsmore and Pugh 2021; Golden et al. 2021; Smyth and Craig 2017) including strong expectations to nurture the autonomy of children (Clemensen 2020; Forsberg 2009; Geinger, Vandenbroeck, and Roets 2014; Smith 2012). From both childhood (Prout 2000) and parenting studies (Weininger and Lareau 2009) this intensive parenting towards autonomy has been described as a paradox as parental control, regulation (Prout 2000, 304) and micromanagement (Weininger and Lareau 2009, 681) seem to stand in opposition to norms of instilling self-control and self-direction in children (Weininger and Lareau 2009). In this article, we studied young people’s stories of their educational choices and parental involvement in order to discern how these crossing ideals can exist side by side in modern youth-parent relationships in Norway. This study contributes to understanding this paradox and argues that the Norwegian context may be particularly apt for this purpose due to the emphasis put on the ideal of nurturing independence in children. In their survey, comparing 30 European countries Berkers and Sieben (2020) found that Norway more than the other countries held autonomy as the preferred child rearing value. In addition, we address the under-explored question of how young people respond to parents’ educational strategies, as recommended by Golden et al. (2021).

Research has described the Nordic countries as a cultural context where norms of young people’s autonomy and freedom are particularly prevalent as such norms have been found to be institutionalised in both welfare (Ahlberg, Roman, and Duncan 2008) and educational systems (Forsberg 2009; Gilliam and Gulløv 2012; Wagner and Einarsdottir 2006). Few studies have however looked into young people’s own perspectives on parental involvement, neither in a European (Golden et al. 2021, with reference to Coe 2013) nor the Nordic childhood context (Strandbu et al. 2019). One notable exception is Gullestad (1996), who described youth in the ‘transformed modernity’ of the late 1980s as drawing on norms of autonomy conceptualised as ‘finding oneself’ and gaining independence through distancing themselves from their parents. This, Gullestad contrasted to the value of obedience reflected in narratives told by the older generation of her study.

Here, we were interested in how the apparent tension between norms of autonomy and intensive parenting strategies is handled from young people’s point of view. Furthermore, we argue that casting light on how young people handle this tension can inform our understanding of what role ideals of autonomy play in the modern youth-parent relationship. Young people’s educational choices make out a particularly suitable case for exploring such relational dynamics, as it is a situation where the stakes for both parties are high and where the act of choosing explicate otherwise implicit norms of interactions between youths and parents.

Through biographical interviews with 23 young men and women (19 years) from Oslo, Norway, we sought to better understand how young people talk about their own educational choices in order to highlight if and how ideals of autonomy coexist with intensive parenting trends in the youth-parent relationship. Applying a Foucauldian framework of analysis, we identified the discourses and subject positions by which young people gave meaning to parental influence as well as to their own autonomy when reflecting on their educational choices. ‘Discourses’ and ‘subject positions’ here denote the assumptions of truths and cultural stocks of knowledge that allocate feasible roles and range of legitimate action (Deppermann 2013) for parents and youths in the context of making life choices. Based on these analyses, our aim was to elucidate the role of consensus and opposition in modern youth-parent relationships, and through this contribute to research on how young people take part in the co-construction of modern parenting roles (see Golden et al. 2021; Strandbu et al. 2019; Vasbø and Hegna 2023).

Autonomous educational choice in the Nordic context

Ideals of young people’s self-determination and right to self-expression can be identified on several levels of Norwegian society. Within the Nordic social-democratic transition regime (Grytnes 2011; Walther 2006) education, in the sense of personal development, has been described as the focus of youth transitions, and educational choice is an important element in this developmental process. Educational choice and counselling at the end of compulsory schooling institutionalise students’ individual and ‘free’ choice between study programmes and upper secondary schools. Educational counselling in Danish (Walther 2006) and Norwegian (Smette 2015) lower secondary schools has been purported to be predominately resting on a strategy to reinforce young people’s own motivation for personal development, as well as on the individual’s knowledge of their own interests. Within this logic, parental pressure towards certain educational alternatives has been constructed as lacking legitimacy (Hegna and Smette 2016; Kindt 2018) when measured against students’ right to autonomous choice (Smette 2015). Thus, Nordic educational institutions seem to perpetuate young people’s freedom to choose autonomously, also in opposition to parental influence.

These ideals of autonomy also play out in individual narratives of educational choice. Kindt (2018) found that Norwegian descendants of immigrants who had been admitted to professional elite educational tracks legitimised their choices by referring to them as the result of personal dreams, denying any parental influence in the process of choosing. Kindt interpreted this as an expression of these young people conforming to a hegemonic majority ideal of autonomy, where the legitimate choice was regarded as the choice that was made independently and in accordance with internal motivations and interests (Kindt 2018).

However, studies from Norwegian and Nordic educational contexts also describe parents as being involved in young people’s educational trajectories (Aarseth 2017; Grytnes 2011). Given the distinct role of the autonomy ideal, the complex balancing act between the demands of involved modern parenting and the demand for young people’s autonomy (Clemensen 2020) might, in some respects, be especially prominent in the Nordic context. These circumstances prompt questions about the power dynamics in modern youth-parent relationships, as it concerns youths’ understandings of their own rights and abilities to decide for and express themselves, as well as what they consider to be legitimate practices of parenting in this regard.

Conflicting ideals of autonomy in the youth-parent relationship

In the present study, we ask what role ideals of autonomy played in the lives of the interviewed youth, using their process of making educational choices as a case. According to the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989; 1991), the modern idealisation of autonomy is anchored in the conviction that one has a ‘self’ that is qualitatively different from the broader circumstances in which one is included. This notion of a self inspires norms of autonomy and legitimises individuals’ unique ability for self-governance. This element of modern culture has tended to idealise personal capacities and freedoms, which we here conceptualise broadly in terms of self-determination and self-expression, such as being able to speak one’s mind, being independent, knowing oneself, being authentic and being able to make one’s own choices (see Taylor 1989; 1991).

However, when echoed by an individualistic culture, the relational aspects of these capacities tend to get obscured (Gillies 2000), causing individuals to overrate the degree to which they are able to operate independent of external factors (Furlong and Cartmel 2006; Kallinen and Häikiö 2021; Taylor 1989). As such, ideals of autonomy are frequently expressed as responsibilisation (Kallinen and Häikiö 2021), entailing that youth are held individually accountable for the consequences of their choices (Furlong and Cartmel 2006).

Young people are expected to be responsible and autonomous actors who are able to exercise their freedom by making life choices that contribute to the actualisation of themselves (Rose 1999, 84), independent of their parents (Butler and Muir 2017). Correspondingly, if parents do not succeed in making their children into autonomous self-governing individuals, this might entail stigmatisation of both parents and their children (Vandenbroeck and Bouverne-De Bie 2006). However, this self-actualisation takes place in what is described as a peril-ridden context. Stable trajectories towards adulthood are made precarious by, amongst other circumstances, increased competition in the labour market (Standing 2011), instrumentalist notions of learning (Wagner and Einarsdottir 2006, 6) and demands for tertiary education (Baker 2014). These are all tendencies that make youth increasingly dependent on parents (Markussen and Røed 2020) and, by the same token, invite parents to be comprehensively involved in the life of their children—a phenomenon that is often referred to as ‘intensive parenting’.

Intensive parenting entails a cultural perception of parents as being fundamentally responsible for their children (Faircloth 2013, 45) with regards to everything from their social and psychological development to their educational outcomes (Craig, Powell, and Smyth 2014, 555). This cultural tendency is termed parental determinism and is intimately connected to modern risk consciousness (Lee 2014), which is associated with a heightened sensitivity to uncertainty and a tendency to focus on everything that can go wrong (Furedi 2009, 205), prompting parents to be highly involved in their children’s lives. However, these dynamics have predominantly been described in terms of neo-liberal competition logics, which, due to relatively robust welfare regimes and availability of public education (Esping-Andersen 1990), are probably less prevalent in the Nordic context than in, for example, the US and the UK (Aarseth 2017), where much of the research on intensive parenting stems from.

How norms of autonomy function within the youth-parent relationship needs to be understood within the specific context in which they are expressed. What it means to be autonomous depends on the cultural circumstances that inform what qualities are attributed to the category of ‘self’ and what features are associated with the society in which that self is to be autonomous. We argue that it is such discourses concerning self and society that prime a culture’s discernment of the capacities required to be recognised as autonomous, as well as what range of actions such capacities can afford (see Taylor 1989), and consequently, how youth interpret and react to the influence of their parents when making educational choices.

To understand if and how norms of autonomy inform the youth-parent relationship, we here leaned on a Foucauldian framework of governmentality, which entails that we investigated how ‘self’ and society are discursively represented in the stories of young people. This allowed us not only to gain a better conception of the modern youth-parent relationship in the Nordic context but also to gain insight into how broader dynamics of power might be understood as expressed and reproduced within that relationship (Foucault 1980, 98–105). The question of how young people co-construct today’s parenting roles and the role of consensus and opposition in modern youth-parent relationships is addressed in the discussion.

Governmentality, discourses and subject positions

According to Foucault, ‘Each society has its own regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse it accepts and makes function as true’ (1980, 131). The Foucauldian notion of discourses denotes the ensembles of ideas, categories and concepts (Hajer 1995, 44) that exists within a particular social field (Hollekim, Anderssen, and Daniel 2016; Kingston 2021). Discourses thus inform what subject positions are available to a given individual in a specific social context (Deppermann 2013), as they allocate what repertoires of action are deemed desirable or even conceivable. This is done through stocks of knowledge and assumptions of truths (Kingston 2021, 63) that ascribes meaning to physical and social realities (Hajer 1995, 44) and individuals’ place in them (Kingston 2021, 63).

Seen through a Foucauldian lens, it is by such discursive systems that humans come to experience and cultivate themselves as certain kinds of selves. In ‘Technology of the Self’ (Foucault 1988), Foucault undertake a critical enquiry into how individuals come to develop knowledge about themselves and conduct themselves in accordance with that knowledge through self-technologies (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine 2017). In the Foucauldian tradition, self-technologies are often understood as intimately connected with notions of autonomy as well as with modern modes of power. Several writers have demonstrated how the understanding of oneself as autonomous serves to constitute governable subjectivities through for example consumer lifestyle choices (Rose 1999), mastering one’s emotions (Binkley 2014) and practicing self-help techniques to reach a state of ever evading self-actualization (du Plessis 2021).

The central connection between power and autonomy rests in the argument that while individuals might experience themselves to be autonomous, the ideal of autonomy prompts modes of self-regulation (Rose 1999, 93) that oblige people to make very specific choices (Rose 1999) that conform to and reproduce the contemporary social order (Sementelli 2009, 52). This propensity for self-discipline in accordance with societal norms under the guise of autonomy amounts to what Foucault termed governmentality. Governmentality goes beyond the fixed distinctions of state and civil society, as institutional norms contribute to the disciplining of the self, also within private relationships (Besley 2010). Previous research leaning on the governmentality perspective has demonstrated how the fostering of the self-responsible subject takes place within the family (Dahlstedt and Fejes 2014) in accordance with discourses delineating what is perceived to be normal and good fostering, adhering to norms of autonomy (Smith 2012) and reinforcing involved parenting strategies that produce the ‘good’ neo-liberal citizen (Kingston 2021). Rather than tracking the specific institutional patterns through which neo-liberal power is perpetuated, as many governmentality-inspired works do, our analysis should be understood as a contribution towards enriching the understanding of how ‘governing at a distance’ (in line with du Plessis 2021, 29) can take place within the structures of youth-parent relationships.

Exploring notions of autonomy within a framework of discursive power does however pose some challenges, which require that we explicitly position ourselves within the debate that concerns if and what real autonomy is allowed for within the fabric of Foucauldian theory. A common way to read Foucault is that the ‘self’ is constituted by self-referential discourses and thus does not have any ontological substance (see Caldwell 2007, 781) that could grant an ideal of autonomy legitimate moral weight (see Taylor 1984). Without a seeming possibility for a ‘self’ located outside discursive formation, it is hard to grasp even the potential for voluntarist positions and actions.

Nonetheless, Foucault himself insisted upon the ability to resist normalising powers, challenge social rules and aspire to freedom as integral to his analysis (Bevir 1999). Several scholars have drawn on his later works in order to argue how Foucault indeed allows for modes of disobedience and opposition, both collectively through discourses of rights (McNay 2000), and individually through aesthetic and creative self-formation (Caldwell 2007). Thompson (2003) argues that Foucault came to recognise the potential for resistance imbedded in a cultural ideal of autonomy, and that how notions of autonomy influences a given culture will depend on the historical context in which it is enacted. We thus understand the ideal of autonomy as having the potential to facilitate conformity to the existing order of things, and to challenge social rules through nurturing both notions of collective rights and novel forms of self-formation, depending on which discourses inform the characteristics that are attributed to ‘self’ and to society. By regarding the ideal of autonomy in this manner, we avoid the determinist pitfall that is sometimes associated with Foucauldian approaches (see Kendall 2019).

It is important to note that the potential resistance to normalising powers should not be understood in terms of simple antagonistic relational structures between parents and youth (Vandenbroeck and Bouverne-De Bie 2006, 132). We are not suggesting that the parent-youth dyad makes out a micro-scale model of the relationship between subject and state, where discipline ‘rolls downhill’, so to speak. A central implication of the theory of liberal power is that parents are also regulated through societal norms (Hennum 2012; Vandenbroeck and Bouverne-De Bie 2006), which are potentially perpetuated within family life. What we are suggesting is that whether or not ‘being autonomous’ provides language and self-understandings that have the potential to legitimise instances of resistance, defiance, or even opposition within the dynamics of youth-parent relationships depends on what truths are held about what it means to be a self and what kind of societal context that self is perceived to be placed within.

In this study, we sought to illuminate if and how norms of autonomy surface in young people’s stories of educational choice and parental influence, and what broader discourses of self and society inform what subject positions young people allocate to themselves and their parents as they make educational choices. This analysis will illustrate what repertoires of action are available by virtue of ‘being autonomous’. In the discussion, we revisit the question of whether ‘being autonomous’ includes challenging normalising powers as it might be expressed both in terms of societal expectations and parental influence, and consequently, how young people co-construct modern parenting roles.

Data collection and analysis

The analyses are based on biographical interviews with youth from a three-generation study exploring identity construction in childhood and youth in Norway. In line with biographical narrative methods previously applied in generational research (Brannen and Nilsen 2002; Nielsen 2016; Thomson et al. 2004), Kristin Beate Vasbø invited 19-year-olds, their parents, and grandparents to narrate their life history, focusing on their childhood and youth.

For the purpose of this article, we used interviews from the youngest generation, a sample of 23 young women and men born in 1992 and 1993. These respondents represented the anchor generation in the overall study. The selection criteria were that they were enrolled in general education programmes and that their parents and grandparents were still alive and had experienced their childhood and youth in Norway. The interviews were conducted in the last half of the school year 2011–2012. All participants gave their informed consent in writing and were, at the time of the interview, students in their last year of upper secondary schools’ general studies programme, which comprised 74% of the Oslo student body at the time (SSB Statistics Norway 2024). They were recruited from six different upper secondary schools in Oslo ensuring varying recruitment according to grade levels and economically diverse neighbourhoods. As vocational study programmes were not included, students with poor grades were less likely to be recruited, and higher education aspirations likely to be overrepresented in the sample. Fourteen of the interviewees had two parents with higher education (58%), seven had one parent, and three had two parents with no education above upper secondary school. Thus, a slight majority of the youngest generation may be categorised with a middle-class background, but had otherwise differentiated schooling and childhood experiences.

All interviews were carried out individually, face-to-face, lasted 2–3 h, and were conducted by Kristin Beate Vasbø in her office at the university. The interview guide was relatively structured, with an extensive set of questions that facilitated the interviewees’ dwelling upon their childhood and youth. However, the interview strategy was to let the interviewees tell their story in their own ‘way, form and style’ (Atkinson 1998, 41), mostly using the interview guide as a checklist. Through the conversation, the researcher covered questions related to a broad range of themes concerning their history and lifeworlds. This included questions about intergenerational relationships, experiences of schooling and future plans for education and work, which provided stories of the interviewees’ educational choices and their parents’ role in these.

In analysing the data, we read and reread all the transcripts, selecting passages in which the young subjects reflected on parental influence in the context of their educational choices. We then conducted a discourse analysis of these excerpts, inspired by the 6-step model suggested by Willig (2008). We identified the places in the interviews where the dynamics of interest were referenced and delineated the ways in which the youth talked about their academic endeavours, vocational and educational choices, and the roles their parents played in making such choices. These first steps informed the initial analysis, focusing on ideals of autonomy, operationalised as broad categories of self-determination and self-expression, as well as whether and how their parents were involved in their choices of higher education. Next, we examined what underlying assumptions of self and society could be traced in stories of parental influence and educational choice. We classified the various repertoires of action available for parents and youth within these discourses, connoting the subject positions the youth allocated for themselves and for their parents. The last two steps involved understanding how the relationship between discourse and subject positions opens up or closes for what types of action, as well as how this dynamic might be experienced from the youths’ points of view.

Youths’ ideals of autonomy and parental involvement

When the interviewed youth talked about parental influence and educational choices, we found that ‘autonomy’ was a privileged discourse in their stories, expressed both as the capacity for self-determination and self-expression. For some of them, these capacities denoted an implicit background, while in other instances, they were stated as explicit norms, as was for example the case with Flora. When asked what in life was most important to her, Flora answered: ‘To have people around you that you love and trust and to have the freedom to do what you want with your life. Like being able to choose your education and make your own choices’. For Flora, as for the others, being autonomous seemed to be a priority.

When these young people talked about their parents’ role in the context of educational and vocational choices, almost all of them presented their parents as sharing the sentiment that the youth alone had the authority to make such choices. It was commonplace with statements such as: ‘They have always told me to do what I want to do and not to think too much about what I think they want’ (May); or, as Tim answered when asked if he felt that his parents had any expectations of him: ‘They’re like: “It would be good if you did this or that”, but they seem happy as long as I’m happy with what I’m doing’.

Most of the young people presented both themselves and their parents as stressing the importance of personal dreams and passions when deciding what path to take, saying things like: ‘They just want me to do what I want to do’ (Fredrik). This privileged discourse of autonomy legitimised young people’s independence in making their own educational choices and could thus be thought to have the potential to inform youths’ unwillingness to let parents be involved in or influence their choices (see Forsberg 2007; Solomon et al. 2002). However, stories presenting parental influence as illegitimate were scarce. A rare example was offered by Alexander when relating how he felt about his parents’ expectations for his future: ‘It stresses me out. I don’t think that they mean to pressure me, but I feel that way nonetheless.’

Alexander, who further reported that he would not pursue his desire to become a writer due to his parents’ opinions on the matter, dwelled on this choice in several instances in his interview, at one point stating: ‘I like to think of myself as an individualist, but apparently I’m not’. Alexander’s defeatist presentation of himself as failing to be an individualist reflects the cultural significance of understanding oneself as someone who is able to choose in accordance with personal interests. This example also serves to illustrate the potential conflict parental influence may pose to a ‘child’ subject position based on a self-understanding that aligns with norms of autonomy.

However, stories like Alexander’s were an exception. In most cases, the youths’ emphasis on being able to choose for themselves and in accordance with their interests did not entail lamenting about parents who pressured them. Nor did they describe their parents as being uninvolved in their choices. On the contrary, parental involvement was talked about as being frequent and welcome:

They have always been like: ‘You have to do what you want to do, you have to take the subjects you want to’. So, they are very open like that. But I really tend to listen if they’re like, ‘Julie, it might be a better fit if you do this or that’. (Julie)

There were ample examples of the teenagers describing that they relied on and made choices in accordance with parental influence. At the same time, most of the youths described it as very important to be able to make independent choices that resonated with their dreams and interests.

This seeming contradiction mimic the tension between intensive parenting and the ideal of autonomy that we sketched in the introduction to this article. Yet, in these stories, ‘being autonomous’ and adhering to parental influence only rarely seemed to present any conflict to them. In the following sections, we explore how the interviewees reconciled this ambiguous position through two discourses: the first (risky futures) signified the youths’ perceived characteristics of the society they expected to function in, and the second (socialisation) signified how the ‘self’ that could and should act autonomously was represented in the youths’ stories. The two discourses correspond broadly to the two aspects of autonomy we have defined above, as the first denotes what the youths perceived as the context in which to exercise self-determination, and the second denotes the perceived ontology of the self (see du Plessis 2021) that was to be expressed. Additionally, as we will show, these discourses also define distinct subject positions both for youths and parents, which are reflected in the interviews.

Risky futures and accountable choosers

The first discourse we termed ‘risky futures’. When talking about their educational choices, most of the youths oriented towards the imagined future society they were to navigate as adults, which they understood to be highly saturated with risks: the risk of not making ends meet, not making the right choices and regretting choices made. Being sensitive to parental advice was portrayed as a way to manoeuvre such risks.

As noted earlier, these young individuals described their parents as emphasising self-determined and navigating in accordance with their own interests when making choices. Still, when choices were framed within a ‘risk discourse’, parental advice facilitated rather uniform aspirations to academic success, social prestige and high-paying jobs, irrespective of the youths’ passions. In the account below, Flora was contemplating her mother’s advice, as she was about to choose whether to follow her dream to become a kindergarten teacher, or to use her excellent grades to pursue a more prestigious occupation.

My mother has always been like, ‘You do what you want, but you have to think through whether it really is what you want’. She looks at the different elements, such as jobs and how much money you make. Like, money is not that important, but if you have a really low salary, you have to think about whether you are able to live on it. So she asks, like, not critical questions, but ‘Have you thought through this and this and this?’ So, she supports me in my choice.

Although Flora describes her mother’s advice as supportive of her self-determination, Flora also seems to accept a premise of risk, which leads her away from a job as a kindergarten teacher. The implication of her mother’s advice is that although Flora’s passion is construed as important, she also has to sensibly evaluate the risk of that passion not being viable in the future.

This evaluation constitutes a subtle shift in the emphasis of choosing, from Flora being free to choose in accordance with her dream to Flora being free to be responsible for the consequences of the choice she makes. The advice that Flora should think about whether following her dream is really what she wants functions to connect her internal passion to more ‘sensible’ orientations. This connection means that ‘being an autonomous self’ requires Flora to adopt a subject position as an accountable chooser. According to du Plessis (2021), techniques of self-formation entail identifying problems standing in the way of what is perceived to be the optimal self, and then pursuing the responses necessary to overcoming those problems. Flora presents her being self-determined as the objective for both herself and her mother as she stakes out her path in life. However, Flora also accepts that her autonomy might be challenged by the future risk of poor finances, and correspondingly that the way to overcome that risk is to be accountable for her choices.

A similar dynamic can be seen when Sonia responds to the interviewer asking her if she feels that her parents have any expectations of what she should do with her life:

They have wanted me to do something I’m passionate about. That I don’t do something just to do it, but that I should work hard to get good grades, so that I can do something I really want to do.

In this quote, the ability to follow a passion is juxtaposed with a narrow set of actions that needs to be taken in order for her to reach that place of passion, namely, ‘work hard and get good grades’. When Sonia accepts this framing, choosing from a place of passion becomes identical to choosing what is sensible. This coupling of foundations for choosing resembles the findings of Mørch, Pultz, and Stroebaek (2018) amongst students in Denmark who readily utilised parental advice and resources (436). However, in order to regard themselves as self-determined, the teenagers engaged in a strategy of combining their interests with long-term educational plans. Most of the youths in our study also seemed to adopt a similar coupling, enabling them to adhere both to the societal norms of following one’s interests and to the sensible choice that parents seemed to nudge them towards.

Although this coupling of passions and being sensible appears rather harmonious in Sonia’s statement above, it is presented with more tension a bit later in her interview. Sonia explained that she prefers to speak to her father about educational choices, as he is more concerned with her doing what she is passionate about than her mother is:

I think that passion is important to my mum too, but if I choose a general occupation, like, for instance, a lawyer, then I will have a lot more opportunities later. If I get tired of doing one thing, then I can just do something else.

Although Sonia started this section of the interview complaining about her mother not taking her passions sufficiently into consideration, Sonia seems to end up accepting her mother’s advice in the statement above. The tension between doing what is sensible and following her passion is effectively bridged by the discursive awareness of the uncertain projections of the future, which necessitates that Sonia assumes a position of an ‘accountable chooser’ who is able to counter risks and simultaneously ensure her ability to act autonomously by making choices that affords ‘a lot more opportunities later’.

As was the case in most of the interviewees’ stories, Sonia did not present her mother’s advice as emanating from any desires or aspirations residing in her mother—in these stories, parents were allocated the subject position of sensible advisors, who invited their children to reflect upon potential obstacles to their future ability to be self-determined. The discourse of ‘risky futures’ served to alleviate the latent tension between norms of autonomy and parental involvement. When considered within a context of risk, being self-determined became dependent upon the youths’ ability to be ‘accountable choosers’, thus legitimising their parents’ subject position as ‘sensible advisers’.

Socialisation and malleable subjects

The second discourse, termed ‘socialisation’, relates to the youths’ implicit perception of the nature of the ‘self’ that could be expressed through their life choices. In the previous section, we demonstrated how young people were able to consolidate the idea of being self-determined while also adhering to the sensible advice of their parents by linking their personal interests to a discourse of ‘risky futures’. Through the discourse of ‘socialisation’, a similar but more fundamental linking is taking place. When the ‘discourse of socialisation’ was actualised within the context of making life choices, the youths’ personal interests, passions, and personalities were presented as something that was fundamentally shaped by parental influence in the course of their upbringing.

This perception of parental influence as being integral to their idea of self was, for example, demonstrated by Mark. When asked if it was important to him to satisfy his parents in his academic endeavours, he said: ‘There’s never been a lot of pressure, but they have sort of shown me what they expect from me, and then I internalised that and did it out of my own interest’. Notably, Mark seems to attribute his conforming to his parents’ influence not to his parents’ expressions of expectations, but to what he perceives to be his own internalisation of that expectation. In doing so, Mark was able to legitimise adhering to his parents’ influence without sacrificing his personal interests—his parents’ influence has, in this account, become his personal interest. Through the ‘socialisation discourse’, parental expectations and wishes are conformed to by means of understanding them as integral elements to who he understands himself to be. Within this discourse, the youths adopted the subject position of malleable subjects who were formed by parents through their position as socialising agents.

Julie adopted a similar attitude to Mark’s when she was asked if she felt that her parents had any expectations of her academic performance:

No, not really. When I think back at the way I have been brought up, it (parental expectations) might be there subconsciously, that I have become like this as a person, and that I have high expectations of myself.

As in Mark’s case, Julie retraced parental expectations as a subliminal influence on her own personhood. Drawing on terminology such as ‘internalised’ and ‘subconscious’ when making sense of the relationship between their own aspirations and parental influence, can be seen in light of previous research illustrating the prominent role of psychology-disciplines in modern self-understandings (see for example Burman 1991; Smith 2012). The malleability of personhood underlies these stories as a matter-of-fact condition of growing up within a family. As such, these youths viewed their own selfhood through the prism of popularized developmental psychology, conveying that parents are the ones who shape their children (see also Lee et al. 2014). This notion of having one’s selfhood formed by parental influence serves to conflate the position of making choices in accordance with norms of self-expression with navigating based on the external influences of parents. Although explicitness varied within this way of reasoning, it reflected a prominent pattern in the youths’ stories.

The conflation of ‘self’ and parental influence within the ‘socialisation discourse’ is perhaps most clearly exemplified by June. When asked to think back to when she first started high school, which in Norway represents the first educational choice following ten years of compulsory schooling, and what she felt her parents’ expectations were at that time, she answered: ‘Well, I know that my mum and dad expect a lot from me. But it’s me who feels that way. But they’re not like: “Take a year off”, they’re in agreement on that, but I feel that way too’. Although June says that her parents expected her to attend high school, June attributes the decision to actually do so to having made that expectation her own—it is she who feels that way. From the subject position of a ‘malleable subject’, the ‘self’ that would merit moral claims to self-expression is already an expression of parental influence.

Only in very few instances was parental influence presented as being at odds with personal autonomy (e.g. Alexander above). Interestingly, in these few cases, the youths also reported to ‘fall in line’ with what they understood to be their parents’ expectations of them. A possible explanation for this can be found in Finn’s story below, where both the discourses of ‘risky futures’ and ‘socialisation’ are actualised. During the interview, Finn repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with his parents’ involvement in his choices, as he had a deep passion for music that his parents, by his own account, tried to discourage him from. Nonetheless, Finn seemed unable to dismiss his parents’ involvement as illegitimate, as became evident by his ambivalence when he was asked if he would act differently if he ever became a parent himself:

It depends. If I saw potential in my son as a musician, I might have helped him, but I would say that school was more important. So, I might not condone that my son became a professional musician. It’s very unstable, so I don’t know.

When Finn was asked to imagine the perspective of a parent, he legitimised the parental influence he would have asserted in favour of a ‘sensible’ choice by evoking a discourse of risk—music makes for an unstable living. Finn also draws on a discourse of socialisation by assuming that a parent should take on a role where they help their child to navigate risks—school is more important. This interpretation is strengthened by something Finn said a bit later in the same segment of the interview:

Parents are very important in how their children turn out as adults. I would have made sure that my kid was active in different kinds of sports, but at the same time (I would) not be too involved because it would be his choice in the end. I think you are responsible for the development of your children, like, if your child ends up as a fat computer geek with no friends, then that’s your fault.

This quote allows some insight into the flipside of the subject position of the youth as ‘malleable subjects’; if things go bad, the parents are to blame. This statement reveals a potential dual function of the ‘socialisation discourse’. Above, we have demonstrated how this discourse served to legitimise parental influence, working in favour of a sensible choice. However, when presented together with the discourse of a risky future, regarding oneself as a malleable subject might also serve to alleviate some of the personal responsibility associated with navigating a risk-ridden society.

Discussion

In this article, we set out to explore if and how young people managed the latent tension between parental involvement on the one hand and ideals of autonomy on the other (Prout 2000) in the context of making educational choices in a Nordic welfare state. Utilising a Foucauldian framework, we delineated what ensembles of concepts, ideas and categories was accepted and functioned as ‘true’ (see Foucault 1980, 131) in young peoples’ stories of making educational choices. Although we found that classic Nordic ideals of autonomy was a privileged discourse in the youths’ accounts, as they emphasised the ability for both self-determination and self-expression, they also presented their parents’ involvement as essential when making educational choices.

We found that young people reconciled ideals of autonomy with parental influence by drawing on discourses of ‘risky futures’ and ‘socialisation’ respectively, which produced corresponding subject positions for both youths and parents. As ‘accountable choosers’, being self-determined became synonymous with managing future risks through adhering to their parents as ‘sensible advisers’, who nudged them towards ‘sensible’ choices. As ‘malleable subjects’, the youths’ notions of self-expression became indistinguishable from expressing the influence their parents had asserted throughout their lives as ‘socialising agents’. In other words, these subject positions effectively functioned to discursively make autonomy dependent on and inseparable from parental involvement, thus pacifying the inherent tension between the two.

Following this, a question of interest is whether these findings can bring light to our understanding of the role of consensus and opposition in modern youth-parent relationships, and through this contribute to research on young people’s role in the construction of modern parenting roles.

Autonomy, consensus and opposition

When positioning our research within the Foucauldian landscape, we argued that an ideal of autonomy might function to assist both resistance and conformity to normalising powers that serves to perpetuate contemporary social orders (Sementelli 2009). Our analysis displayed little evidence of the ideal of autonomy assisting resistance to normalizing powers by informing notions of self-determination that could inspire opposition to parents or to the individualised responsibility represented by the need to make ‘sensible’ choices. Nor did we find that the ideal of autonomy assisted novel forms of self-formation through lending moral substance to a self that could be uniquely expressed.

Rather, the ideal of autonomy seemed to undermine the potential for resistance through being combined with discourses where the societal context the youths had to navigate appeared risky, while the self that could resist or subvert existing structures of power took on qualities of being malleable. This finding echo what Dean (2010, 262) termed ‘the neoliberal governmentality paradox’ ‘in which the subject’s freedom and subjection superimpose and presuppose each other, as autonomy moves from being the antithesis of power to being its telos.’ (in du Plessis 2021, 45), resulting in governable subjectivities (Rose 1999). In their stories of educational choices, the youth displayed subject positions that made them ready objects for both parental influence (Caldwell 2007, 777) and for the ‘sensible’ advice their parents offered, leading the youth to make choices in line with existing social and economic hierarchies.

Another way to approach this analysis could be to assume that the youths and their parents were unified in their prestigious educational aspirations, which would account for the lack of conflict present in the youths’ stories. However, this interpretation is challenged by the fact that the examples that deviated from the norm of prestigious aspirations adhered to the same discursive logic as the stories that conformed to such aspirations. These exceptions to the norm were represented most clearly in the stories of Finn and Alexander, who were the two who came closest to a language of resistance. Their accounts serve to accentuate both the inherent discursive tension between the ideal of autonomy and parental involvement, and the ineffectuality of mounting opposition from a position of an ‘accountable chooser’ and a ‘malleable subject’.

In Alexander’s case, the conflict between his passion and the wishes of his parents ultimately took the shape of an internal conflict, as he was the one who was accountable for his choices. His decision not to pursue writing became an expression of his failure to be the autonomous individualist he thought himself to be. Self-determination as a norm was tapped for potency without there being someone or something to be self-determined against. Finn’s prelude to dissent similarly collapses on itself, as he understands parents as being responsible for how their children turn out. This externalisation of responsibility disenables Finn from challenging the influence of his parents and following his passion. The moral rationale for expressing oneself loses its footing when the experienced self is discursively reduced to the result of parental influence.

The way that the ideal of autonomy functioned in these stories contrasts with youths’ autonomy described by Gullestad (1996) in the 1990s. In her study, young people’s autonomy was presented as a result of negotiations that rested on youths’ ‘being themselves’, emphasising ‘separateness and discontinuity’ and a ‘struggle against some externally imposed rules’ in their relationship with their parents (36). Although autonomy as an ideal was present in the stories of ‘our’ youths, its function seemed very different. Recent studies into youths’ political engagement and rebellion in Nordic countries show that today’s political engagement among young people does not mirror the former belief in an authentic subject that could reject old conventions to emancipate themselves to a more authentic freedom (Lieberkind and Thormar 2022).

Youths’ construction of the ‘intensive parent’

We previously asserted that the potential the ideal of autonomy holds for resistance to existing power structures should not necessarily be understood as antagonism between parents and youths, but rather as an attitude that could be cultivated within the relationship. Conversely, the potential the ideal of autonomy holds for conformity to normalizing powers might also be cultivated within the family dynamic. In this regard, it is interesting that the discourses that underpinned the stories of these young people and made them able to reconcile an ideal of autonomy with parental involvement closely resembled discourses associated with intensive parenting that we have outlined previously in this article (see Furedi 2009; Craig, Powell, and Smyth 2014; Lee 2014).

When analysing what context the interviewees understood themselves to act autonomously within, we found that context to adhere to a discourse of ‘risky futures’. Similarly, a central element to the high requirements placed on parents is often explained in terms of a risk consciousness (Furedi 2008; Lee et al. 2014; Romagnoli and Wall 2012). Important here is that the interviewed youths seemed to hold a similar conviction to that which is described as the prominent discourse in modern cultures of intensive parenting—namely that parental involvement in the form of advice was a resource for handling potential risks. A second central element to cultures of intensive parenting is parental determinism, connoting the sentiment that parents alone are responsible for who their children turn out to be (Faircloth 2013; Lee et al. 2014; Widding 2018). Again, the sentiment of parental determinism aligns with the interviewed youths’ discursive notions of their ‘selves’ as being something that was shaped through socialisation with parents.

These findings are interesting as they demonstrate that the premises of the intensive parenting discourse, which has frequently been described as underlying the disciplining of the modern parent (Hays 1996; Lee et al. 2014), were perpetuated by these young people, who thus could be seen to contribute to the cultivation of ‘the intensive parent’. Although Finn was the most explicit in stating his views on the comprehensive responsibilities of parents, the general allocation of parents to subject positions of ‘sensible advisers’ and ‘socialising agents’ entails a positioning of parents that resonates effectively with how the intensive parenting literature describes the role of modern parenting. Further, our analysis illustrates that central notions of intensive parenting—risk conceiousness and parental determinism—were mirrored in the stories of the youths as discourses that legitimised parental influence towards the sensible choice. In other words, it seems fruitful to regard the power dynamic in the youth-parent relationship not as a dynamic of a centralised linear authority or negotiations, but rather as a shared field of discursive logic that informs the positions of both youths and parents.

It is however important to note that we cannot know to what degree these stories are reprepresentative for Norwegian youths at large, as there are limitations to this study. Firstly, although our analysis did not detect differences in how the youth handled the tension between parental involvement and ideals of autonomy based on variations with regards to parents’ education, they had all been recruited from the general studies program in Oslo, which is the theoretically oriented educational track in upper secondary school. Further, all the youths’ parents and grandparents grew up in Norway. We cannot know if we would find the discourses delineated here in stories told by youth who came from dramatically different backgrounds, or who had already made different educational choices. Secondly, although gender did not appear to have any bearing on the way these youths related to parental influence broadly, there seemed to be potential gender differences that were not covered by the scope of our analysis. In our relatively small group of interviewees, the tendency was that the ones who were most conflicted with regards to reconciling ‘being autonomous’ with parental influence were both male. Whether this tendency represents an expression of differences in gender roles deserves further research.

Acknowledgements

The study design was based on a previous Norwegian cross-generational study conducted in 1991 by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Monika Rudberg. The study has been approved by NSD (Norwegian center for research data), who has evaluated the procedure for conducting interviews and storing data.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The interview data is not available due to confidentiality considerations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was part of a larger project, led by Fengshu Liu - Modernisation as lived experience. Three generations of young men and women in China and Norway—funded by the Research Council of Norway under the FRIPRO program (Grant No.: 2205050/F10).