Explain the concept of youth from a socio-cultural perspective.

Youth is not just related to age. Age refers to a biological reality. However, the meaning and experience of age and ageing or growing up is influenced greatly by the society, culture and historical era we inhabit. Thus youth is socially and culturally constructed. It is necessary to make note of the fact that the inherited assumptions in youth psychology are largely borrowed from developmental psychology about universal stages of development (that are the same across cultures). However, like any phase of development, youth too is not devoid of influence of culture. Youth is a dynamic notion and it keeps evolving with time and space. Cultural context and historical moment determine how youth is defined, understood and developed. In this regard it is important to understand the ecological perspective offered by Bronfenbrenner (1986, 2004), according to which development is affected by multitude of factors. This theory posits that development reflects the influence of several environmental systems – microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. The microsystem is the setting in which the individual lives and includes the person’s family, peers, school, and neighborhood. The interaction of the youth with parents, peers, and teachers helps him construct the experience of youth. The mesosystem involves relations between microsystems or connections between contexts. Examples are the relation of family experiences to school experiences, school experiences to religious experiences, and family experiences to peer experiences. The exosystem consists of links between a social setting in which the individual does not have an active role and the individual’s immediate context. For example, a youth’s experience at home may be influenced by his/her mother’s experiences at work. The macrosystem involves the larger culture in which individuals live. This refers to how a youth is shaped by cultural norms, practices and values. The chronosystem consists of the patterning of environmental events over time and transitions over the life course, as well as socio-historical circumstances.

Thus from this perspective, youth is seen as a social process and not just an age group of people. This perspective regards internalization of cultural values an important developmental task of youth in all cultures. In a globalizing world with multiplicity of values and religions, with diverse economic conditions, parenting practices and social norms, youth develop differently. For instance, in developing countries like India, children from lower socio economic families are expected to start working at an early age. Youth growing up in a country under military regime or facing terrorism will be very different from a youth growing up in a country where the government ensures safe transition from childhood to adulthood. Youth who lives on the street for whom survival is the solitary concern will be very different from a youth living in an affluent family for whom growth and education is the only concern. Further, there are many ways in which growing up in the 2000s in the industrialised world is fundamentally different from what growing up in the 1970s entailed. Male and female youth are also very different. Thus gender also plays a very important role in defining youth.

The socio-cultural perspective helps us to appreciate the heterogeneity that exists within the youth population. Thus, youth is not merely a category. It is also a dynamic process of experiencing life by virtue of being at a certain stage of development. It does have some universal or common patterns, because of the correspondence with adolescence that is characterized by universal biological process. Nonetheless, we need to recognize the significant role of social institutions (e.g., family, school), culture (values, beliefs and practices) and of changing economic and political circumstances and their impact on youth.

The period of youth is crucial because it is the threshold to adulthood. National Youth Policy apart from promoting youth as a productive work force, also aims at creating a strong and healthy generation with social values and community ties that participates in civic engagement activities. It supports youth at risk and creates equitable opportunity for all disadvantaged & marginalized youth.

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