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CHAPTER TWO: SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE MEANING OF 'INDEPENDENCE' AND RESTRUCTURING TRANSITIONS TO ADULTHOOD
Before beginning the review of research on young people making a transition from being looked after to independent living, it is appropriate to acknowledge difficulties in defining 'independent living' and a context of wider social change restructuring the nature of the transition to adulthood for the majority of young people.
For young people, the process of 'becoming independent' is overlaid with 'becoming adult'. What counts as 'independence' and 'adulthood' is historically and culturally specific and claims of 'independence' typically mask inter-dependencies. Leaving the parental home to establish a separate household is a culturally recognised form of 'being independent' and the one with which we are most concerned in this review. However, this is not and has never been the only way in which young people have achieved a sense of adulthood or independence. Historically, working-class young adults living 'at home' while paying board money from their wages drew a sense of independence from 'earning their keep', even when objectively their income was not sufficient to set up their own home and they were still subsidised by their household. Moreover, young adults in their own households are often not fully independent either objectively or subjectively. In the present, many young people who have left their parental home, nevertheless, continue to receive and rely on significant amounts of emotional, financial and practical assistance from their parents (Holdsworth and Morgan, 2005), even if feeling and presenting themselves as 'independent adults'. Those who leave home without support, may, ironically but understandably, feel less secure in their own 'independence'.
Across many of the more affluent countries of the world, patterns of leaving home, partnership formation and having children have been modified as part of a changed landscape of routes to 'independent living'. The Economic and Social Research Council ( ESRC) funded a major British programme of research Youth Citizenship and Social Change (1998-2003), in turn building on an early programme of work The 16-19 Initiative (1985-1991) (Catan, 2004), which documented the radical extension of the transition from youth to adulthood for the majority of young people. A key aspect of the change is the restructuring of labour markets and the disappearance, since the mid decades of the twentieth century, of many forms of employment that were once predominantly performed by young men or young women. This was followed by a radical increase in the proportion of young people remaining in education, in recent years until at least the age of 18, in order to gain better qualifications. Later partnership has also followed. Cohabiting now replaces marriage as the form of first living with a partner. The modal age of first parenting is now in the late twenties and early thirties rather than in the early twenties as it was in 1970s, although a minority of young people continue to become teenage parents without intending this outcome. These widespread changes have not ended differences between Northern Europe and Southern Europe in patterns of leaving home, with young people in the former leaving home for independent housing relatively early. However, many Northern European young adults continue to receive some financial and practical support in their new homes. In Britain, various forms of direct income support for young people, unemployment benefit, housing benefit and student grants, shrank during the years of the Thatcher government, increasing their dependence on their family for material and financial support. This meant an increase in the numbers of 'returners', young people moving back to the parental home when they have difficulty sustaining more independent living.
In combination, these changes have been described by a number of leading researchers as creating increased polarisation between the managed and supported 'extended dependency' of young people from well resourced families and the more difficult transitions of young people whose parents lack economic and/or social capital (Jones, 2002). A supported extended transition to independent adulthood cannot so readily be managed by family households where resources are already over stretched. The continued impact of socio-economic background on young people's possibilities of making their own way in life is confirmed by longitudinal data, both quantitative (Bynner et al, 2002) and qualitative (Thomson et al. 2004, Thomas et al. 2002).
At the same time it is important to acknowledge that most parents who are economically poor, nevertheless, provide their children with support. A detailed study of young people in an area of multiple deprivation (Macdonald et al. 2005, 2002, 2001) indicated that most young people, including some teenage parents, benefited from financial subsidy and emotional support from their parents. But those who left home very early and went onto chaotic housing careers, characterised by multiple and unplanned moves in and out of temporary arrangements and social housing, typically experienced family conflict and instability and insecurity in other parts of their lives. Recent literature draws a more specific contrast between the majority of young people whose family and informal networks assist in their gradual achievement of independent living and the few with precipitous accelerated and multiple transition combining early exit from education and/or home with other unplanned moves in housing and family life. They typically lack family support and their unplanned moves often result in or signal increasing marginalisation and social exclusion from mainstream economic and social life (Social Exclusion Unit, 2005). If young people leaving care lack family support or effective substitutes for that support, then vulnerability to chaotic transitions and social exclusion could be anticipated from this more general literature.
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