SOCY 284 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Parental Investment, Risk Society, Late Modernity

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 284
• Professor: Ryan Martin

Document Summary

A period of extended youth in recent decades in western industrialized societies have seen the productive roles of children decline, the extension of formal education, and the delay of the traditional markers of adulthood. Childhood has been prolonged - characterized by the dependence on adulthood. Even younger are immersed in consumer culture, emphasizing values of choice, taste, and lifestyle. De traditionalization: todays democratic family prizes authenticity, intimacy, reciprocity, trust, recognition, and role flexibility in a culture of self fulfillment and individual rights. Paradoxes: children are increasingly surveilled yet mistrusted: disenfranchised, yet called apathetic, valued for their imaginative capacities yet lead increasingly organized lives. Giddens - post traditional relationships are more democratic. Children are losing the depth of vertical, cross generational relationships as these are replaced by horizontal connections. Identities are increasingly defined through the often transient markers of lifesytle and media practices rather than the traditional, typically stable markers of age, gender, ethnicity, and place (livingstone)