Valentine 2003

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Boundary Crossings: Transitions from

Childhood to Adulthood
a
GILL VALENTINE
a
Department of Geography , University of Sheffield , Winter
Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK E-mail:
Published online: 28 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: GILL VALENTINE (2003) Boundary Crossings: Transitions from Childhood to
Adulthood, Children's Geographies, 1:1, 37-52, DOI: 10.1080/14733280302186
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Children’s Geographies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 37–52, 2003
Boundary Crossings: Transitions

from Childhood to Adulthood
GILL VALENTINE
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:32 12 June 2015
Gill Valentine, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street,

Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail: G.Valentine@Sheffield.ac.uk
ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that the boundary between childhood and adulthood
is very difficult to define. Notably, it is blurred by the ambiguous period of ‘youth’. I
therefore draw upon Beck’s theoretical work on individualisation and the life-course,
which has been influential in youth research in sociology and youth studies, to provide
a framework for reviewing some of the processes through which young people make the
transition from childhood to adulthood. In the conclusion I reflect on the need to explore
the importance of the different spaces implicit in young people’s transitions, and the
interconnections between them. I also highlight how distinctions between the states of
childhood and adulthood are not clear-cut, nor are transitions a one-off or one-way
process. Rather I draw attention to the way that changes associated with growing up
may or may not be connected, and may occur simultaneously, serially or not at all.
Finally, I point out the limitations of normative models of transition given the way that
other social differences such as gender, class and sexuality intersect with the categories
children and youth.
Introduction
In the early 1970s two major studies laid the foundations for the development of a small
but significant body of work on children’s geographies. First, Bunge’s (1975) work in
Detroit and Toronto identified the way children are spatially oppressed. This proved to
be the touchstone for a range of subsequent research on children’s lived experiences,
specifically in relation to their access to, and use of, space (e.g. Hart, 1979). Second,
Blaut and Stea’s (1971; Blaut et al., 1970) research on the early mapping skills of
children pioneered a body of work on children’s spatial cognition (e.g. Matthews, 1987,
1992). From these roots children’s geographies have subsequently flourished and
diversified (for overviews see for example: Matthews and Limb, 1999; Holloway and
Valentine, 2000; Aitken, 2001) as evidenced by the launch of this journal.
However, what childhood is, and where it begins and ends, and consequently where
the sub-disciplinary boundaries of children’s geographies lie, are somewhat ill-defined.
Children are assumed to share a commonality because of their biological age that
distinguishes them from adults and in turn prescribes both discursive and activity spaces
for them. Focusing on the North it is possible to argue that childhood is imagined as a
time of innocence and freedom from the responsibilities of adulthood. Certainly, the
ISSN 1473-3285 print; ISSN 1473-3277 online/03/010037-16  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1473328022000041652
38 Gill Valentine
lives of children in the contemporary North are shaped by a number of important shared
experiences: they spend most of their day-time at school; their lives are strongly
circumscribed by adults; they experience spatial restrictions on the basis of age (such as
not being allowed into bars/clubs and so on); and their independent mobility is restricted
by parental concerns, a lack of their own money, and access to transport (although this
is not to suggest that children are a homogeneous group, rather, for example poverty,
disability, being taken into care or looking after a sick parent, can all deny children a
right to what is considered ‘normal’ childhood experiences).
When this period of childhood ends and adulthood begins is obscured by the liminal
period of youth (James, 1986; Sibley, 1995). James (1986) observes for example that
legal classifications that might be understood to define the responsibilities of adulthood,
such as the legal age at which young people can drink alcohol, earn money, join the
armed forces, vote, and consent to sexual relationships, are incredibly varied. Indeed, the
terms ‘youth’ or young people are popularly used to describe those aged between 16 and
25, a time frame that bears no relation to diverse legal classifications of adulthood. While
children aged 5–16 should be at school, young people aged 16–25 may be at school,
college or university, other forms of vocational training, in paid work, unemployed,
doing voluntary work, travelling and so on. They experience far fewer spatial restrictions
than their younger peers because it is easier for a young person in their late teens or early
twenties to pass as ‘older’ than they actually are in order to gain access to places such
as clubs and bars from which they might otherwise be excluded. Young people also
usually have access to some form of income independent from their parents, some live
away from the parental home on a temporary or permanent basis, and their independent
mobility can be enhanced by the possession of driving or motorbike licences. As a result
their lives are less obviously circumscribed by parents, teachers or other adults.
If we think of childhood not in terms of a biologically defined age group but rather
as a performative or processual identity it becomes even more elusive to define. Growing
up is often measured in terms of competence and responsibility—where children are
assumed to be less competent, less responsible and less mature than adults (Brannen and
O’Brien, 1995). Yet, many children demonstrate incredible maturity in managing their
own and others’ lives (Stables and Smith, 1999), while many adults can behave in
irrational and irresponsible ways. This performative rather than biological understanding
of ‘age’ means that by acting in a responsible way in a particular space or time children
can ‘grow’ in terms of how others regard them; correspondingly their perceived age can
also shrink if they behave in a ‘childish way’ (Solberg, 1990; Valentine, 1997). Thus,
while the transition from childhood to adulthood is often assumed to be linear as young
people move from school to work, leave the parental home and so on, many people do
not move neatly from a state of dependence to independence. They might start work and
then lose their job, leave home, move into rented accommodation for a while and then
move back home. Or they might simultaneously be ‘child-like’ and ‘adult-like’, for
example by living at home and being financially dependent on their parents while also
having an autonomous sexual relationship and becoming a parent themselves. In this
way, transitions from childhood to adulthood can be complex and fluid.
Even as young people take on all the mantles of adulthood—a job, their own home
and so on—they may still be treated as, or at least retain, the identity of ‘children’ in
their own parents’ eyes—accounting for their movements, relying on parental advice or
additional financial support, etc. Finch and Mason (1993) observe that the range of
support (from material and practical to emotional and moral) provided by families
throughout our lives, with their ill-defined sense of obligations, is one of the unremark-
able characteristics of everyday life.
Boundary Crossings 39
Moreover, while we may only be legally defined as children for a set period of our
lives—0–18—our childhoods are present in all of us. Our experiences as children, and
memories of this period, can shape who we become. Children’s geographies should not
therefore just be about the lives of those defined by a particular age. Rather than
conceptualising childhood as a fixed or static category that we grow out of, it is
important instead to understand childhood as a process that shapes us throughout the life
course.
Implicit in this too is the need to recognise that children’s geographies are not just
woven into the temporal fabric of our lives but are also bound up with much wider
geographies and structures. Although children’s lives are often focused on the home,
school and the neighbourhood, these geographies are contained within much wider
structures such as the economy, the state, etc. While social studies of childhood have
highlighted children’s agency (Prout and James, 1990) we need to acknowledge the
social structures and agencies that also shape children’s and young people’s lives, and
the way that other social identities such as gender, class, race, sexuality and so on
intersect with the identity child.
In this paper I therefore want to focus on the processes through which we cross the
boundary from childhood to adulthood, and how these transitions are bound up with
wider structures such as the labour market, the family, the education system, consumer
culture and so on.
While the age range 7–14 has received considerable attention from geographers, the
discipline has been slower to consider young people on the cusp of childhood and
adulthood: those aged 16–25. This is a somewhat ironic neglect, given that the emphasis
within the sociology of youth has been on the importance and implications of young
people’s actions and the distinctiveness of their cultures. In other words, on the
importance of how young people’s lives are constrained by space but also how they
actively produce their own space.
Yet this is not to suggest that work on young people has been absent from geography.
Rather it has been an ‘absent presence’ (Shilling, 1993, p. 9) in the discipline.1 Absent
in that it is not visible as a distinct area of sub-disciplinary work, yet present in three
ways. First: while there is a body of work on youth geographies it is very fragmented,
being spread across a range of sub-disciplinary areas including social, cultural and
economic geography. As such little attention has been paid to the interconnectedness of
young people’s actions in different domains, e.g. home, school, work, the street. One
consequence of this has been that this work has lacked the intellectual coherence and
visibility of studies of youth in other disciplines. Second: youth have been implicitly part
of, rather than explicitly identified within, geographical work on a wide range of topics
including the underclass, the policing and privatisation of public space, homelessness
and so on. This perhaps reflects the fact that while geographers are increasingly sensitive
to difference predicated on race, class, gender, and sexuality, the preoccupation with
these categories has clouded out the significance of childhood/youth. Third: a significant
amount of geographical work on youth has been carried out by European researchers
(e.g. Kruger, 1990; Hooghiemstra, 1997; Lieberg, 1997; Richard and Kruger, 1998). Yet,
because of language barriers this work is not widely acknowledged by British and North
American writers. As Bynner et al. (1997, p. 5) argue, ‘Language barriers have led to a
comparative isolation of British youth researchers from the flow of debate across the
continent: in contrast the majority of continental youth researchers are able to access
Anglo-American literature’.
In focusing here on the transitions young people make from childhood to adulthood
40 Gill Valentine
I therefore want to draw on the German theorist Ulrich Beck’s (1992) concept of
individualisation.
Beck (1992) argues that we are witnessing a historical transformation in society. The
industrial era, which has been characterised by rationality, scientific knowledge, social
hierarchies and tradition, is being challenged by a new modernity in which changes in
the labour market, familial relations and class cultures are creating new life situations
and new biographical development patterns, and a shift in ways of thinking about how
individuals relate to society. Notably, the life course is no longer organised around
employment history with the consequence that the possible pathways young people can
follow after school are becoming more diversified. Traditional agencies such as the
nuclear family, school, church and so on are no longer key agencies of social
reproduction, channelling individuals into set roles. Thus Beck (1992) suggests that this
destructuring of young people’s situations is placing them in a state of ambivalence.

Whereas previously young people could see what possible futures awaited them now
they cannot see where they are heading. Social change is eroding traditional forms of
knowledge and communication (e.g. expert knowledge). Faced with a proliferation of
choices young people’s biographies are increasingly reflexive in that young people can
now choose between different lifestyles, sub-cultures and identities. With these opportu-
nities also come increased risk for young people, in the form of guilt or blame if they
end up on the margins of society as a result of their own choices.
Drawing on this theoretical framework, in the following sections I examine some of
the processes that are shaping young people’s: entries into the labour market and exit
from schooling; familial dependence; consumption and identities; and social commit-
ments.
Transitions into the Labour Market

Some of the earliest and most influential work on youth emerged from the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Drawing heavily on Marxist
theory, writers argued that young men’s identities were determined by their class
position. Most notably, Hall and Jefferson (1976) suggested in their now classic book,
Resistance through Rituals, that working class men developed distinct sub-cultures based
on class solidarity. Likewise, in another well known study, Learning to Labour, Willis
(1977) argued that working class lads’ anti-school culture reinforced and reproduced
their social position trapping them in low paid working class jobs. In other words, Willis,
and Hall and Jefferson, claimed that social inequalities were reproduced from generation
to generation. This work set an agenda for youth studies throughout the 1980s. Indeed,
Evans and Furlong (1997) document a range of research which focused on the notion of
‘career trajectory’ in which an individual’s class of origin was seen as shaping their
labour market destination with little scope to escape this destiny.
Since the late 1980s and early 1990s economic restructuring and associated institu-
tional changes have produced a transformation in European and North American labour
markets. Traditional skills have rapidly become obsolete as new technologies have both
destroyed and created jobs producing different labour markets with the consequence that
it has become increasingly difficult for young people to make an early transition to
employment. Education and training are now being prolonged, and there has been an
expansion in higher education and in various job training and creation schemes, a growth
in youth unemployment and an extension in dependency on the family (compounded in
the UK by the contraction of the welfare state and benefit entitlements for the 16–18 age
group) (Bynner and Roberts, 1991). As a result youth as a category, which bridges the
perceived states of dependent childhood and independent adulthood, is both more sharply
defined and extended too. Rather than Marxist explanations for young people’s labour
market destinations based on class, there has been a shift towards poststructuralist
accounts in which individuals’ choices and their ability to judge and negotiate risk are
seen as important in shaping their biographies. Evans and Furlong (1997, p. 18) argue
that this has also brought a shift in the use of metaphors—away from ‘trajectory’ towards
‘navigation’—that they point out conveys a sense of young people having to negotiate
their way through ‘a sea of manufactured uncertainty’.
Despite the changes that have taken place—both in terms of labour markets, and
language used to describe the way young people deal with them—the labour market
destinations of young men are still the focus of both popular and academic concern.
While it is traditional male employment in the industrial sector that has dried up, growth
areas such as the service sector have favoured the recruitment of women, whose
deferential interpersonal styles and willingness to work part-time or flexible hours are
regarded as more attractive and appropriate to employers than the traditional cultural
attitudes and ‘laddish’ behaviour of working class young men (McDowell, 2000, 2002).
Yet despite this apparent ‘crisis of masculinity’, McDowell’s (2000, 2002) research
suggests that this picture does not resonate with young men themselves who continue to
aspire to working in traditional gendered occupations and to marry and establish a settled
home life.
Individuals’ opportunities to navigate the employment landscape are shaped not only
by gender but also by other aspects of social identity. A number of studies have exposed
the linguistic and cultural disadvantages and institutionalised racism that young people
from ethnic minority groups have to negotiate (Brah, 1994). Within geography, Bowlby
et al.’s (1998) recent work on young Pakistani Muslim women in Reading, UK
demonstrates that racialised and gendered conceptions of ‘ideal employees’ and the
perceived fit between ‘type of employee’ and ‘job’ restrict the employment opportunities
of these young women, although Phillips’s (1999) study of the black middle class in
Leeds suggests that young people from ethnic groups are developing strategies to
achieve their job aspirations, forging new middle class ethnic identities.
Institutions and the wider support networks within which young people are located can
play a key role in shaping their ability to determine their employment outcomes. Evans
and Heinz (1994) argue that high achievers with strong social support tend to accomplish
autonomy in their occupational goals (which they term ‘active individualisation’);
whereas low achievers with weaker social support networks tend to have less clearly
defined employment aspirations and their strategies to achieve these are also, not
surprisingly, more uncertain (what they term ‘passive individualisation’). Here place
matters. Social networks, which play such an important part in providing information
about employment opportunities and ways of gaining jobs (Hanson and Pratt, 1995;
McDowell, 2002) and in developing social and cultural capital (Bowlby et al., 1998), are
a product of specific social and physical environments, as Bowlby et al.’s (1998) study
illustrates.
While contemporary changes in the labour market have opened up new possibilities
for many young people to follow more diverse pathways to self-actualisation, they have
also seen the emergence of an underclass. These are people who have a fundamentally
different relationship to the world of work and family life than those who are part of the
class system, who are structurally separate, culturally distinct and often spatially
segregated too, living on sink estates in risk environments of crime, drugs, prostitution,
etc. (Campbell, 1993). For children growing up in these environments there are few
opportunities beyond eking out a marginal existence on the dole, in casual employment
42 Gill Valentine
(so-called ‘McJobs’), petty enterprise and quasi-criminal activities. With none of the
traditional markers of adulthood available, such as ‘real’ work, young men in particular
are experiencing new forms of disadvantage and alienation, although, as MacDonald
(1996) points out, claiming the dole at the same time as earning extra income in these
ways is also an example of the enterprise culture and self-actualisation rather than
dependency.
Leaving Education
While geographers have shown some interest in young people’s entry into the labour
market, there are few examples of geographical research that address their exit from the
education system. Indeed the space of the school has largely been neglected (though
notable exceptions include Fielding (2000), Valentine (2000) and Holloway et al.
(2000)). Yet, local cultures within both the formal and informal school, such as learning
processes and peer cultures respectively, may foster or inhibit successful transitions to
adulthood.
Beck (1992, p. 93) claims that ‘The educated person becomes the producer of his or
her own labour situation, and in this way, of his or her social biography … Depending
on its duration and content, education makes possible at least a certain degree of
self-discovery and reflection. The educated person incorporates reflexive knowledge of
the conditions and prospects of modernity, and in this way becomes an agent of reflexive
modernization’. It is an argument that places the emphasis very much on individuality.
Yet, the evidence of a diverse range of studies within sociology and critical education
(Gilligan, 1982; Epstein and Johnston, 1994; Holland et al., 1994; Haywood and Mac an
Ghail, 1995) is that peer group cultures and relations within school/college are crucial
to young people’s sense of identity, self-esteem, and security; and that as a consequence
young people have to learn how to articulate their individuality while at the same time
conforming to peer ‘norms’ that are highly embodied and are predicated upon adult
notions of heterosexualised gender identities. In this respect Hey (1997, p. 135) argues
that for young women ‘normality’ is understood through its opposite ‘as the place not
to be’.
In an innovative study of the school as a significant site of identity construction,
geographer Melissa Hyams (2000) argues that for young Latina women in Los Angeles,
completing high school—with all that this achievement represents in terms of future
employment opportunities—is dependent on the way that they negotiate their gender
identities and sexual morality. In exploring the way they talk about their experiences of
be(com)ing high school students, Hyams suggests that for the young Latina women
‘There is an integral relationship between their gender and sexual identities conceived in
terms of “victimisation” and “loss of control” and their historically low academic
achievement and attainment’ (Hyams, 2000). In another geographical study which has
some resonance with Hyams’s work, Holloway et al. (2000) suggest that the highly
gendered character of UK school cultures is reflected in the very different attitudes of
male and female pupils to computers and in the patterns of information technology (IT)
use which generally favour males over females. These are negotiated through competing
masculinities and femininities played out within the school through normative under-
standings of heterosexuality. In this way, Holloway et al. (2000) argue that the
heterosexual economy of the IT classroom may shape young people’s technological
competence and subsequent employment prospects.
This is not to suggest that it is only peer group cultures that shape the competencies
and abilities of young people to navigate the diverse pathways open to them and to make
the right choices about when to leave education. Homes and neighbourhoods are also
important locations in the differential transmission of the meanings and value of
education to life chances. For example, families not only pass economic capital down the
generations but also social and cultural capital in the form of attitudes to education,
manners, connections, access to books/culture, knowledge of university life and so on,
while differential levels of neighbourhood deprivation can also affect young people’s
decisions about when to leave the education system. On the one hand, Raffe and Willms
(1989) argue that high unemployment in the local area puts young people off leaving
school at the minimum age and so increases educational participation rates. Yet, on the
other hand neighbourhood deprivation can pull in the opposite direction, encouraging
premature exit from the education system (Evans and Furlong, 1997).
Leaving Home
One consequence of the destandardisation of work and growth in higher education is that
many young people are experiencing an extended period of dependency on their parents,
such that having a sexual partner appears to be becoming a more important (and more
stable) signifier of adulthood than being in paid employment (McRobbie, 1991; Griffin,
1993). For some young people having their own child may be a route to secure housing
and to making the transition to adulthood which they are unable to make in the labour
market.
The traditional transitional pattern in which young people were expected to move from
single status to marriage to the establishment of an independent couple household before
having children is, like the parallel fragmentation of the school to work transition, being
replaced by a variety of routes into parenthood. Relationships, households and children
have been decoupled from each other and can occur in any order across all social classes
(Stacey, 1990). Partnership without marriage, lesbian and gay households, establishing
households and having children without a partner, reconstituted families and so on are
all increasingly common forms of relationship. The instability of contemporary house-
holds also means that many young people are backtracking—leaving the parental home
and then returning (Jones, 1995).
Sibley (1995) argues that it is their parents who usually control the domestic
environment and establish boundaries within it and that as a consequence their children
have only limited opportunities to carve out their own space; while parents may also
suffer from a lack of privacy due to the constant presence of their offspring. He uses a
dichotomous categorisation between ‘positional’ (where power is vested in an authority
figure such as the father) and ‘personalising’ families (where power is equally distributed
between family members), in which these are taken as opposite poles separating various
forms of control, to think about family regimes and how boundaries are established.
Sibley’s (1995) work draws on adults’ recollections of their childhoods from a Mass
Observation study and does not therefore specify the age of the young people nor the
detailed context of the family. However, other research within family studies and
sociology suggests that within contemporary families the extended dependency of young
people is a source of friction within the home. On the one hand young people struggle
to be recognised by their parents as adults; yet on the other hand often reject parental
values and articulate their individuality (Jones, 1995). Such tensions can become
particularly apparent in households where a young person comes out as lesbian or gay
(Johnston and Valentine, 1995; Valentine et al., 2003). Indeed lesbian and gay youth can
often be excluded from the ‘family home’ or experience domestic violence when they
articulate their sexual identity, while Hooghiemstra’s (1997) research demonstrates how
44 Gill Valentine
the emphasis placed within Moroccan and Turkish families in the Netherlands on
protecting the virginity of young women until marriage limits their independence,
specifically, the amount of time they are allowed to spend outside the home.
While young people living at home may often resent the protective concern of their
parents, for those who have grown up in the care of the state, the lack of a support
system exacerbates the problems young people have making the transition into perma-
nent housing of their own. They often experience turbulent housing careers, moving
between various forms of temporary and short-term accommodation. As a consequence,
young people who have had very unstable and fragmented experiences of ‘home’ have
little experience of eating proper meals or of eating with and in front of other people
(Bell and Valentine, 1997) and find it hard to manage their own lives and adjust to a
settled way of life. Not surprisingly, young people who have spent time in care form a
high percentage of the homeless and prison populations (Coles, 1997). Thus Allatt
(1997) calls for the closer incorporation of ‘the family’ into the concept of youth—point-
ing out that many families provide important support and resources to aid young
people’s transitions despite the fact that families are conventionally portrayed as the site
or relationships from which young people are attempting to escape.
In contrast, to those with weak family support who have to make an early transition
to independent living, young disabled people often undergo protracted transitions
because they are over-protected from the outside world by parents anxious about their
ability to make the transition to independent citizens. This positioning of disabled young
people within the family can in turn serve to position them within wider society, because
the nature of the relationship between parents and their offspring can serve as a model
to orient young people in their relationships with all other adults. In particular,
relationships of dependency can diminish individuals’ sense of identity and reproduce
relationships of inequality between these young people and adults they encounter in
other aspects of life.
Consuming Identities
In the 1960s psychologists and sociologists looked at youth as a stage in the life cycle
arguing that it was a time of ‘identity crisis’, a period labelled by German writers as
‘Sturm und Drang’—storm and stress—to capture the emotional troubles and anti-social
behaviour associated with young people (Rattansi and Phoenix, 1997). This categorisa-
tion was closely linked to the development of research on youth along twin themes:
‘youth as a problem’—as an undisciplined and potentially unruly group in public space
(Pearson, 1983); and youth as a distinctive consumer group with specific tastes in a range
of goods and services including magazines, music, clothing and so on (Abrams, 1961;
Hebdige, 1988).
In this regard youth researchers were looking at issues of identity before ‘identity’ was
on the academic agenda. Yet, the focus was very much on identity conceptualised in
fixed or static terms. In particular, between the 1960s and 1980s the emphasis was
squarely on young working class men. This research ranged from the delinquency studies
of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Cohen, 1955; Matza, 1969) which looked at gangs, arguing
they were a disturbing reflection on dominant culture; to work on specific sub-cultural
identities such as teds, mods, rockers, skinheads and punks (e.g. Hall and Jeffordson,
1976) which focused on young men’s attempts to resist and subvert dominant culture by
creating their own meanings (Rattansi and Phoenix, 1997).
The transition from industrial to postindustrial economy has been characterised as a
period of rapid economic, social, and cultural change in which there has been a process
of detraditionalisation of older patterns of life, a rise in the significance of consumption

and the proliferation of lifestyles (Rattansi and Phoenix, 1997). New forms of globalisa-
tion are attributed with creating opportunities for the emergence of new identities and
social movements (e.g. the rise of the lesbian and gay movement) while throwing up
uncertainties as former collective identities, for example class solidarities, are eroded
(Rattansi and Phoenix, 1997). Thus Giddens (1991) argues that emancipatory politics
(based on class, gender, etc.) has been replaced by ‘life politics’—strategies to enhance
the self rather than collective control.
Within youth research there is now a growing interest in the intersection of class,
gender, race, sexuality and so on (e.g. Hooghiemstra, 1997). Identity is now conceptu-
alised as relational, as only developing and operating in relation to other identities. At
the forefront of this theorisation is the work of Back (1996), Brah (1994, 1996), Gillespie
(1995) and Dwyer (1998, 1999). Through rich empirical studies they each explore some
of the ways that black and Asian British youth locate themselves within particular
narratives of identity. For example, both Brah and Dwyer’s research on young Muslim
women examines the ‘differential incorporation of Asians into discourses of Englishness,
Britishness and the racialised social relations of gender and generation in post colonial
Britain’ (Rattansi and Phoenix, 1997, p. 134), while studies of white people’s involve-
ment in black musical culture and the way young people from different ethnic
backgrounds consume television advertisements have explored the contextual processes
through which young people use music and the media in the negotiation of their
identities (Taylor, 1998).
Consumption is regarded as crucial in the construction of young people’s identities.
Sociological and geographical work has established that material goods are not only
things in their own right but that they also convey meanings (e.g. about style, class and
so on) and that consumption rituals mark social relationships of inclusion and exclusion
(friendship, family ties and so on). As Holbrook and Jackson (1996, p. 1914) argue,
consumption rather than being a simple momentary act of purchase ‘is a social process
whereby people relate to goods and artefacts in complex ways, transforming their
meanings as they incorporate them into their lives’. Thus goods are consumed for what
they signify and for differentiating the self as well as for use value. Young people, in
particular, are active agents in the production of youth styles and identities (although
Nava (1992) points out that these styles are also often appropriated by commercial
organisations).
While there are a number of studies of the relationship between the consumption of
material possessions and young people’s identities, specifically in relation to the
production of contemporary masculinities and femininities (e.g. Nixon, 1995; McRobbie,
1997), Desforges (1998) explores the way British middle class youth are forging their
identities through long haul travel. He claims that the cultural capital young people
gather from their independent travel experiences is converted into economic capital back
in the workplace. Thus through their travel young people participate in a process of
othering and constructing first world representations of the third world, while simul-
taneously earning themselves a privileged position in the West.
The French sociologist Maffesoli’s (1995) concept of neo-tribes—‘ephemeral groups
formed in the flux of contemporary consumer societies, replacing the earlier collectivities
of class, gender and “race”, demanding intense emotional investments, and being
spatially located in shopping malls, sports venues and concert halls and stadia’ (Rattansi
and Phoenix, 1997, p. 138)—has been heavily drawn on by geographers, while Malbon
(1998, 1999) employs Maffesoli’s work to understand the emotional community
generated through clubbing; similar ideas are implicit in Richard and Kruger’s (1998)
46 Gill Valentine
study of the German techno music scene and the LOVEPARADE in Berlin, and
Hetherington’s work (1998) on new age travellers.
The dynamism of youth cultures is articulated in many contemporary urban landscapes
where capital (developers, the leisure and cultural industries) has sought to embrace the
desire of young people ‘to have a good time’ by earmarking certain sectors of cities as
‘leisure, cultural or entertainment spaces’ and promoting the development of club and
cafe cultures and music venues. Many of these landscapes are targeted at youth as
consumers—while simultaneously being ‘produced’ by young people working in the
night-time economy as bar and waiting staff, disc jockeys and so on.
It is a landscape highly regulated by closed-circuit television and private security, as
increasingly are most city streets and malls (Fyfe and Bannister, 1996). A number of
geographical studies suggest that young people are only welcome in these revitalised
public spaces, that are alleged to be symbolically and economically regenerating North
American and European cities, if they are working or actively consuming. Young people
hanging out on the streets or in the mall are considered a polluting presence and a
potential threat to public order (Lieberg, 1997), such that homeless young people can
only enter shopping centres by avoiding certain types of dress to blend in (Ruddick,
1996). Yet as Katz (1998) and Vanderbeck and Johnson (2000) both argue public
spending cuts, urban degeneration and crime have eroded young people’s access to other
forms of public space. In the US moral panics about ‘gangs’ and violence have
demonised non-Anglo youth (Lucas, 1998) to such an extent that curfews and policing
tactics are selectively deployed against them (Breitbart, 1995), for example producing
swathes of Los Angeles as no-go areas for black and Chicano youth (Davis, 1990). Thus
as Rattansi and Phoenix (1997, p. 143) argue, ‘while it is obviously important to
emphasise young people as creative makers of their own identities [and I would add
spatialities], in relation to consumption as well as other spheres, these creative possibil-
ities are bounded. The divisions of class, gender and “race” continue to be of profound
significance in imposing constraints which are themselves reinforced by the officially
sanctioned production of identities through a variety of regulatory agencies from schools
to the prison’.
Life on the Margins

Allatt (1997, p. 90) argues that all young people are vulnerable to becoming marginalised
because vulnerability is implicit in the notion of transition. Marginality is often
conceptualised in terms of exclusion from paid employment. Yet there are many
different routes to economic and social marginality because transitions to work and
domestic independence dovetail, such that having no home address or the ‘wrong’
address can be a barrier to gaining work; while having no income from a job punctures
young people’s housing prospects. Rather than just concentrating on the transition from
school to paid employment, Allatt (1997) argues that researchers need to explore some
of the more complex processes through which young people are socially excluded and
how these may be thrown into reverse.
Within geography, research on the disabled and on lesbian and gay lives suggests that
while there is heterogeneity both within and between these two groups (and of course
they are not mutually exclusive), there are also commonalties in how they experience
processes of marginalisation. Both groups are alienated from traditional forms of support
being liminally placed betwixt and between society’s dominant structures. For example,
‘the family’ is often assumed to be the main source of continuity and support during
processes of transition from dependent childhood to independent citizen yet many
disabled young people have able-bodied parents, likewise most lesbian and gay young
people have heterosexual parents. For both groups then the family often does not
synthesise the experiences of the generations or serve necessarily as a guiding ‘norm’.
Both can be marginalised within youth cultures. Body fetishism and homophobia are
evident in a wide range of youth cultural practices and representations of youth
(Shakespeare et al., 1996). Both groups are also commonly isolated as the only (or one
of only a few) gay or disabled people within educational or workplace environments and
can experience discrimination from employers and the wider public. For example,
ablebodiedness is an assumed feature of contemporary Western life. Until very recently,
the dominant discourse on disability has been influenced by medical understandings of
the body (Parr and Butler, 1999). Within this discourse disabled people are seen as ‘a
problem’ because physically or mentally they do not ‘fit’ into ableist social, political and
economic structures. This definition process has been used to justify their exclusion or
marginalisation in terms of their access to work but also the type of work they do
(largely low paid, low skill jobs). Thus the obstacles to integration in the workplace
young lesbian and gay and disabled people experience may become a form of disadvan-
tage that impacts cumulatively on other forms of disadvantage. Indeed, disabled writers
have even drawn parallels between lesbian and gay concepts of ‘passing’ (the pressure
to appear to be heterosexual) and ‘coming out’ (recognising a lesbian or gay sexual
identity) with disabled people’s experiences of ‘passing’ as able-bodied in everyday
spaces and ‘coming out’ in terms of recognising and identifying as disabled (Shake-
speare et al., 1996).
Yet despite the obstacles some groups of young people encounter, marginal youth can
form an effective opposition to the dominant culture and make a difference. This is most
evident in Ruddick’s (1996, 1998) work on young homeless people in Hollywood. She
describes how in the mid 1970s, the deinstitutionalisation of runaway youth and changes
in juvenile correction saw young people emptied onto the streets. In the absence of
support services, a punk squatting scene emerged in particular areas of Hollywood Hills.
Three forms of marginal space supported (and symbolised) this oppositional culture:
places for gigs (clubs and bars); places to crash (condemned buildings); and places to
hang out (such as a cemetery). Through their tactical inhabitation of particular spaces
Ruddick (1996, 1998) argues that the punk squatters won resources for marginalised
youth on their own terms and contributed to changing the philosophy of services aimed
at eliminating the presence of young people on the streets.
Citizenship and Participation

One consequence of the extension of dependency discussed in a section above is that
young people who cannot support themselves financially do not necessarily have the full
rights of citizenship of an independent adult. For example, in the UK income support
benefits are not paid at an adult rate until the age of 25 because the government assumes
that young people who are not in paid employment should live in the parental home and
be partially financially supported by their families. Jones and Wallace (1992) describe
contemporary youth as ‘semi-citizens’, arguing that: ‘If young people are to gain any
sense of the obligations of citizenship in our society, they must be treated as citizens and
granted rights as citizens’ (Jones and Wallace, 1992, p. 154).
Another manifestation of what Beck (1992) has termed the risk society is that now that
the traditional socialising agencies of family, school, church are no longer key agencies
of social reproduction, older, class, gender and national loyalties have been eroded.
There has been a rise of new social movements and various forms of single issue and
48 Gill Valentine
identity politics (e.g. greens, anti-racism, lesbian and gay politics) (Rattansi and Phoenix,
1997) with young people creating their own challenges to the production of rural and
urban space.
New age travellers are one such example (Hetherington, 1998). In contrast to the
English middle class representations of ‘the rural’ as picturesque or pastoral, new age
travellers view nature as mysterious and spiritual. Their attempts to live in harmony with
the environment expressed spatially through nomadism bring them into conflict with the
efforts of farmers, landowners, local authorities, and police to maintain or reproduce the
so-called ‘rural idyll’. This is a clash that Hetherington (1998) argues is a contest of
representations.
Other very different examples can be found in the urban US and in former East
Germany. Breitbart’s (1995, 1998) work is an important example of the way young
people can attempt to challenge hardships that appear beyond their control. In the face
of economic decline which impacted directly on young people through the built
environment, youth in Detroit, Michigan, US used creative talents usually expressed
through graffiti, to revision their local environments through public art projects. In doing
so Breitbart (1995, 1998) suggests that they not only transformed their environment but
in the process gained some pride, opened up intergenerational dialogues, and expanded
their political knowledge of the underlying social and economic forces impinging on
their lives. This in turn motivated them to push for more change. In the former German
Democratic Republic (GDR) young people also actively engaged in processes that
constituted their lives. In the communist period young people’s spaces were controlled
by the GDR state through the educational system and an officially sanctioned youth
organisation, Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth). By these means the state
sought to instil Marxism–Leninism into young people while protecting them from the
corrupt influence of the West (Freiburg and Mahrad, 1982; Smith, 1998). Yet Smith
(1998) demonstrates a range of various scales and sites through which young people
resisted the GDR state and she explores some of the continuities in their use of urban
spaces to critique the state after German reunification.
Conclusion
In this paper I have argued that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is very
difficult to define. Notably, it is blurred by the ambiguous period of ‘youth’. The
processes through which we make the transition from being regarded as children to
adults are therefore complex and fluid. In this paper I have drawn upon the German
author Beck’s theoretical work on individualisation and the life course, which has been
so influential on youth research in sociology, social policy, and youth studies, to provide
a framework for reviewing some of these processes.
The themes under which this paper has been divided—transitions into the labour
market, leaving education, leaving home, consuming identities, life on the margins and
citizenship and participation—suggest six fruitful areas for future geographical research.
In particular, there appears to be a need to explore the importance of different life spaces
and the interconnections between them (e.g. school and work, work and home) that are
implicit in the transitions that young people make from dependent childhood to
independent adulthood. After all, the distinction between the states of childhood and
adulthood is not clear-cut, neither are transitions a one-off or one-way process. Changes
associated with growing up such as leaving home, getting a job, becoming a parent may
be or may not be connected and may occur simultaneously, serially or not at all.
In this paper I have also drawn attention to the fact that children/young people are not
a universal category. Social differences such as class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. can all
play a part in defining the transitions that we make. One problem with measuring
transitions to adulthood in terms of processes such as getting married or becoming a
parent is that these conceptualisations are implicitly normative, and do not therefore
acknowledge difference, for example, the experiences of lesbian and gay young people.
Likewise, many conventional measures of autonomy are also based on material things
such as income, home ownership, and consumption rather than personal qualities such
as self-esteem and efficacy that may be less transient. Indeed, many of those who might
be defined as vulnerable or on the margins of society demonstrate great resilience in
successfully attaining lifestyles of stability, productivity and well-being despite difficult
childhood circumstances (Valentine and Skelton, 2003).
In this sense perhaps rather than applying adult measures of the extent to which
children have achieved ‘adulthood’ we need to pay more attention to the different ways
young people themselves define and understand this boundary crossing. As such we also
need to question to what extent social categories such as gender, race, class and sexuality
actually have any meaning for young people as they grow up.
Finally, this paper has only focused on how processes of transition from childhood to
adulthood are viewed in the North, yet it is equally as important to look at what it means
to be a child or an adult, and how such transitions are measured, in other cultures and
societies.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the support of the Philip Leverhulme prize.
Note
1. This term was used by Shilling to describe the body within sociology prior to the 1980s.
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Boundary Crossings: Transitions

Gill Valentine, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street,

destructuring of young people’s situations is placing them in a state of ambivalence.

Transitions into the Labour Market

of detraditionalisation of older patterns of life, a rise in the significance of consumption

Life on the Margins

Citizenship and Participation

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