(SCY1b) Sociology of Childhood and Youth II: Generation: Expectation, age, family, and inequality

The papers in this session are curious about what is generated by generation. Generation invites us to consider the tensions produced through expectations about age, and what is produced within and carried through different stages of life (whether that be inequality, investment, or trauma). The papers in this session explore how ideas of generation—including the experiences of a specific generation, interactions between generations, and transgenerational trauma—shape young people’s lives. Tags: Children And Youth

Organizers: Rebecca Raby, Brock University, Hunter Knight, Brock University; Chair: Hunter Knight, Brock University

Presentations

Dawn Zinga, Brock University; Natalie Tacuri, McGill University

Balance and conversation: How competitive dancers and their parents navigate parental Involvement

Many competitive dancers are required to spend significant amounts of time practicing in the studio, typically training and rehearsing between 8-20 hours each week. Participating in competitive dance yields substantial costs and personal demands on both dancers and their parents, including competition fees, studio tuition, and time commitments. As is the case for many competitive athletic pursuits, there are additional costs and time commitments associated with traveling to competitions, all of which make it necessary for parents of competitive dancers to be dedicated and highly involved. Our research focuses on how dancers and their families manage these commitments and navigate parental involvement. Additionally, as the environment of the competitive dance world is highly gendered and is, unlike many other athletic contexts, heavily dominated by girls and young women, we are also interested in how gender shapes the ways in which mothers and fathers are involved. According to Schupp (2017), dance competition culture can send clear messages about how gender should be performed. We argue that what is often overlooked in research is that those messages are not restricted to the stage. They also permeate how dancers are supported and view their parents’ involvement. Sandlos (2015) argues that there is an implicit understanding that mothers will be highly involved and devote themselves to supporting their children’s competitive dance experiences. In this analysis, we use Butler’s concept of gender performativity to help inform us about the expectations that competitive dancers have of their mothers’ and fathers’ involvement as well as how they characterize the involvement of other dance parents in studio and competition contexts. We conducted an exploratory study examining the experiences of young competitive dancers across three types of studios: Competitive (e.g. acro, ballet, contemporary, hip hop, jazz, lyrical, modern, musical theatre, tap), Highland, and Irish. There were 41 dancers who participated in the study - Competitive (13 participants, 12-17 years), Highland (15 participants, 12-19 years), Irish (13 participants, 12-19 years). Through semi-structured interviews, we identified the convergences and divergences existing between dancers’ competitive experiences in these three dance contexts. In this paper, we discuss dancers’ identification of strong convergences across contexts in terms of how dancers and their parents negotiated parental involvement and four themes resulting from our qualitative analysis: Parental Support and Involvement; Parental Knowledge of Dance; Expectations; Decision-making and Autonomy. These categories emerged from the dancers’ reflections on how they have navigated their own parents’ involvement as well as their observations of other families. While dancers indicated some convergences around what they believed to be too much or too little involvement, they predominantly agreed that parental involvement was a type of balancing act that needs adjustment for family situations and the individual preferences of dancers and their parents. Essentially, dancers and their parents must work to find the level and types of parental involvement that are right for them. Parental involvement was not seen as static but as something that must be continually adjusted to context, including parental capacity/preference and dancer need/preference. Dancers reported typical gendered stereotypes around the ways in which mothers and fathers tend to support their children’s dancing, with far more involvement being expected of mothers. Discussions about fathers’ involvement revealed that they tend to participate differently than mothers and, while many dancers viewed father involvement in a stereotypical way, several wanted a different level of involvement from fathers. Our discussion centres around how gender performativity can be applied as a theoretical framework to understand these gendered dynamics and consider how parental involvement in competitive dance might shift as attitudes about gendered parenting roles continue to evolve in the future.

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Non-presenting authors: Lisa Sandlos, York University; Danielle S. Molnar, Brock University

Dan Woodman, University of Melbourne

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

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.  

Eamama Daniyal, York University

Collective Memory Unpacked: The Impacts on Assyrian Diasporic youth

Recent literature has shown that diasporic youth face transgenerational trauma from older generations, often pressuring them to preserve their identity through their collective memory. These memories are often rooted in violence and oppression which lead members of a collective group to use religion and politics as two main outlets for identity preservation and mobilization. In recent years, youth in the diaspora are seen using new tools and technology to redefine their position in the diaspora. I hypothesis that the collective memory of trauma and the recent shift away from being viewed as victim diasporas is apparent in 1.5 and 2nd generation Assyrian youth, between the age of 18-30, living in the diaspora. The research conduct aims to focus specifically on the Assyrian diasporic community. Assyrians are an Indigenous group to areas of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In order to better understand the intergenerational and continuous push for the preservation of Assyrian identity in the diaspora, key works of Memory studies will be engaged with such as, Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, Giled Hirschberger’s conversation on collective trauma and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory. This research will focus on the relationship between Assyrian diasporic youth and how they use their collective memory to redefine their collective diasporic identity. Specifically, I pose the following question; How has the collective identity of Assyrian youth in the diaspora been impacted by their collective memory? It is important to note that the discourse and scholarly work on these diasporas is still fairly new and so a comparative approach to different racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups will be used to map similar trajectories for Assyrian youth in the diaspora. A particular intersection, which will be the focus of this research, is between diasporic youth in their redefining process and their use of social movements and participation in religious, political, and cultural organizations to mobilize change. This study looks at different student and youth led Assyrian North American organizations, and how they provide a space for Assyrian youth to maintain their identity while using new tools from the diaspora. Through the participation and collaboration with and between organizations and groups, one diasporic youth group is able to build ties and a wider sense of community with other diasporic groups that aim to promote the same or similar message. Some of these organizations include but are not limited to cultural organizations like; the Assyrian Chaldean Syriac Student Union (Canada), Assyrian Student Association (USA), and Assyrian Youth Federation of America (USA). As well the research hopes to also bring into the conversation emerging religious, church-based, youth groups as a contributing factor to the diasporic identity building process. The goal is to shift the narrative away from diasporas as victims and prey to assimilation into host country, to one where youth are creating a new sense of belonging while maintaining a proud and confident connection to their identity.

Lindsay C. Sheppard, York University; Melody Minhorst, Brock University; Rebecca Raby, Brock University

"I found this balance between being mature and childish": Age and early work

Research on children's and teenagers' early work tends to focus on safety concerns (Breslin et al. 2008; Zierold 2017), effects on education (Post and Pong 2009), parental involvement and family dynamics (Kao and Salerno 2014; Runyan et al. 2010), and skill-building opportunities (Hobbs et al. 2007). There is a small body of qualitative research that explores children and young teens' earliest experiences and thoughts about work in Canada (e.g., Yan, Lauer and Jhang 2008). We add to this literature, with a focus on children and teenagers' subjective thoughts about, and experiences with, work. We draw on a SSHRC-funded project that explores children and teenagers' experiences with paid work outside of the home, including jobs like babysitting, as well as serving fast-food. Our project includes interviews with children and teenagers in Ontario and British Columbia aged 11-16, as well as focus groups and surveys with teenagers in grade nine in Ontario. While all interview participants had work experience, some survey and focus group participants did not. In this paper, we ask: How do young teens think about and experience age in early work? Theoretically and methodologically, we are informed by a relational approach to child studies that centres young people's perspectives and experiences, recognizes the relevance of inequality, and attends to the relational complexities of their discursive and material participation (Raithelhuber 2016: Wyness 2013). We discuss three emergent themes. First, we discuss participants' variable and sometimes contradictory thinking about children and teenagers working, including their distinctions between "mature" work-ready teenagers and other teenagers who are not, as well as dangerous and appropriate "teen jobs", as distinct from "real" jobs. Second, we report on the saliency of age in participants' early work experiences. Here, our discussion emphasizes age in relations with employers, coworkers, and customers to participants' assumed competencies (from employers and themselves), alongside ageism and the relevance of other forms of social inequality, such as social class. Finally, we illustrate the related dynamics and performativity of age by engaging with moments where participants troubled a static understanding of age. For example, some teenagers reflected on how they play down or play up their age in particular work contexts, how they move between and remix the boundaries of "child"/ "child-ish" and "adult"/ "mature" at work, and how they flip the script on age relations, for example, when they train older employees. Across these themes we illustrate the complexity of age when discussed in relation to work, highlight how early work is a unique context for age-related experiences, and demonstrate how age-based and other inequalities can unfold and be challenged in work.