Young People's Representations of Conflicting Roles in Child Development, 2004-2005

The research for this mixed methods study addressed the social construction of child development by investigating young people's experiences of work and ways in which they think about different working activities. Its particular focus is young people who are performing jobs that are commonly assumed to be inappropriate for children and are more often viewed as work for adults. The two atypical work roles chosen for the project were language brokering (translating for a family member) and performing caring duties for an adult family member. The project developed in two phases using mixed methods. A survey of working patterns of 1,002 young people in Years 10 and 12 (aged 15-18) from six schools and colleges in the South East and South Coast of England revealed that 98.4% of males and 99.0% of females had undertaken some form of paid or unpaid work. 6.6% reported that they had acted as a language broker at some time (of whom 71.2% were female). 6.4% reported that they had acted as a carer for an adult at home (of whom 64.5% were female). The second stage involved interviewing 46 of the respondents to the survey about their experiences and representations of both typical and less typical work roles. Thematic analysis of the interviews suggests that the participants overwhelmingly drew on a notion of normal childhood as a way of understanding young people's work. Normal childhood was seen as a time for dependency, education and play and not as a time for work. However this representation does not adequately theorise the lives of the young people in the study who had had experience of atypical work roles. Many of these participants drew concurrently on a view of normal childhood and a more contextualised alternative childhood in which their atypical activities were normalised within specific socio-cultural spaces.<br> <br>