Youth development

Socialisation of a new generation, intergenerational exchanges, and generational shifts are distinct to realisation of human potential of young people and associated with key issues of social development. Throughout their youth individuals form value-normative understandings, worldviews, and transition from their distinct social status to social positions in society.

Youth development relates to socialisation of a new generation and such generational shifts as changes in worldview, values, and activities. The youth themselves are understood as demographic group that occupies a place and role in social reproduction. Youth is marked by the characteristics of young people’s social status, modes of action and practices of manifestation of social development, as well as a distinct relation to other social groups within society.

Social culture relies on changes based on cultural approaches discussed by an American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Changes occur through focus on the experiences of previous generations and traditions, mastering the values and norms of peers and reference groups, and through formation of a culture of the future through the development of new values and norms of behaviour based on the propositions of the younger generation. At the same time, intergenerational relations depend on the pace of scientific, technological, and social development of society.

Generation became understood as a socio-demographic group characterised by certain conditions of socialisation and through gaining of life experiences. Furthermore, generation is characterised by common roles and functions, prevalent values and attitudes, sociopsychological characteristics and lifestyle.

Youth development aims at addressing the needs of youth and introduces young people and other interested parties to the primary and secondary socialisation of youth.

New generation needs social integration. Questions arise in relation to such issues as conflict management, mechanisms for the formation of legal consciousness and prevention of deviant behaviour, political consciousness and sociopolitical activity. Consideration and understanding of risks associated with social exclusion as opposed to social integration become an important part of youth socialisation. Socialisation is closely linked to the knowledge of value-normative complexes and the formation of personal worldview.  

Education of young people examines such questions as particularities of their social status and the process of transition into one or another social position in society.  Educational and professional trajectories fill discussions about the situation of younger generation in education and labour market, as well as inform of social mobility of young people. Nonetheless, youth is heterogeneous. Young people are diverse in age, gender, place of residence, professional activity, social status, income, type of identification, stages that inform their life cycle and other characteristics. There is synchronic and diachronic hyperdiversity. Concurrently, these same youth are socialised in a specific historical period. In this way socialisation occurs at macro, meso, and micro levels. At the individual and demographically determined group levels, it is strongly connected to the self-identification and self-determination of the individual and the younger generation. The occurrence of the historical period is not an exclusively socially controlled process, but also a spontaneous one.

Moreover, the process of socialisation and development of youth in the modern world is usually associated with the media, social networks, and social media. Globalisation, digitalisation, virtualisation, social mobility and the influence of modern institutions diversify and accelerate social exchanges. While such modern tools can in part serve to satisfy the needs to meet the values of self-realisation, they absorb and lead to a state of anomie characterised by the loss of absolute values in the group and individual consciousness of the young people. Simultaneity becomes sociologically significant when people participate in the same social and historical events, share a common destiny and ideas, and this becomes difficult in the socially fluid contemporary world without some accompanying adaptations for preservation of collective wellbeing and acknowledgement of individual familiarisation with contemporary surrounding world. Person’s positive self-consciousness is closely related to the base of resources and competencies associated with ethnic and civic identity. The experience of self-consciousness is an integral part of the global problematic of the existence of the humanity itself. Identity is a complex mental reality. Self-consciousness includes most diverse levels of consciousness such as individual and collective, ontogenetic and sociogenetic. Self-identity is formed and used in interpersonal relationships throughout one’s education and professional activates, as well as in other relationships such as with family and peers. Unlike self-identity, self-consciousness is a non-reflective dimension that contains subconscious and unconscious. In some ways, self-consciousness resembles the philosophical understandings of epistemological and ontological existence, which is inherent in ancient thought and contemporary religious cultivation.

Modernity encounters such generational phenomena as ideas of secular-religious cults that sociologists consider from the point of view of the multiplicity of cultures in a world where the process of growing up acquires social context. Family, kindergarten, school, and then various vocational education, work or professional activities serve as institutions of socialisation, but they are complemented by such more diverse forms of socialisation as army or religious education.

Moreover, media, social movements, and political parties accompany the institutions of socialisation. Furthermore, the social life of young people is complemented by youth subcultures. Youth subculture is considered a special form of organisation of young people and influences their style of life and thinking. It is distinguished by specific values, norms, and patterns of behaviours. Subcultures serve to satisfy the desire to form one’s own worldview and oppose the surrounding world and older generations. Countercultures go further and become so much in opposition to society that they often encounter a convergence with delinquency. Cultures can express themselves though additions in the form of peculiar behaviour patterns, appearance, and forms of leisure activities.

Sociological views suggest to distinguish differentiation of youth based on stratification, age, and subculture.

Normalisation of youth is a cultural process associated with the realisation of the human potential of youth and is associated with key issues of social development. Youth is a generation of people going through the stage of socialisation and integration, prepared by society for absorption and fulfillment of social roles. Objective processes, such as education and professional self-determination, as well as subjective ones associated with multifaceted determination of personality, are part of the organisation of social life. Young people move from an object of control to a subject of action, to social subjectivity. Social and personal maturity in the form of responsibility for one’s actions are the result of successful socialisation.

Supporting young people in their socio-psychological, value-normative, and role development is the key to successfully meeting the needs of development, self-knowledge, reflection, as well as sociocultural security and occupation of the desired social position in society.