The Political Economy of Youth in the Context of the 'Asset' Economy: The growing role of the 'bank of mum and dad'


Dan Woodman, University of Melbourne

This presentation engages in debates about the political economy of youth, drawing on longitudinal data from Australia. In youth studies, political economy approaches (such as Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Côté 2014; and Sukarieh and Tannock 2015) focus on the way the status of youth is used to disadvantage young people, both in education and employment, to the advantage or older generations, or to neoliberal capital accumulation in general. This presentation maps these debates as they emerged during the 20th century and their contemporary iterations before turning to the neglected effects of the changes mapped on integrational relationships. These relationships are changing as time in education extends, transitions to work become more complex and in a context in which older generations in many countries have benefited from asset price increases, particularly in housing. Parents are increasingly supporting their young adult children in the context of an extension of precarity further along the life course for contemporary cohorts. This is changing intergenerational relationships such that young adults are more likely than their parents to receive in-kind transfers (such as rent-free accommodation in the family home) and direct financial transfers from their parents. Drawing on mixed method (qualitative interview and quantitative survey) longitudinal data from Australia, the presentation looks at the role of these transfers in emerging patterns of mobility and in the re-creation of inequalities across generations. Many intergenerational supports from parents to children once associated with teenage years now characterise youth and young adulthood and parents in Australia are increasingly financially supporting their children well into young adulthood. It is established these financial transfers are being used to support young adults’ housing transitions, particularly home ownership, but the effects of the ‘bank of mum and dad’ are potentially far wider, impacting on the education, career, and relationship outcomes of young adults. The presentation shows that in Australia these transfers are in many cases being used to manage financial insecurity and a cost-of-living crisis faced by young people but in other cases, parents are helping their children to pursue extended education and manage a period of insecure and poorly paid employment on the way to more secure and well-paid careers in areas such as medicine, academia, and journalism. I use this analysis to further develop an approach to the political economy of youth informed by the sociology of generations, one that is better attuned to changing dynamics in intergenerational relationships (Woodman 2022). I return to the foundational work of Karl Mannheim (1952) on generations to develop his insights on the role of intergenerational relationships between a generation of students and an older generation of teachers educating within the context of rapid social change, extending these ideas to intergenerational relationship within the family, particularly between parents and their young adult children. Through this I argue that a political economy of youth, if it is to best provide insights into contemporary inequality and barriers to social justice, needs to attend to the way that social change reshaped the life course of contemporary young people’s parents, and how this has facilitated changing intergenerational demands within the family.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: