engleski

Youth, Adulthood and the Future

The relation of youth toward youth, adulthood and the future fulfills the image of the Croatian youth today, and especially in comparison to the generation of youth from fifteen years ago. The basic finding is that the Croatian youth is polarized into those advocate the youth-centric concept, and those who find the adult-concept of youth more appealing. Since the inclination toward youth-centric orientation is related to the level of development of the society, we can state that the Croatian society is still marked, to a considerable extent, by traditionalist conceptions - within which the patriarchal and paternalistic relation toward youth are especially pronounced - and that a more significant modernization in this regard has yet to follow. The past decade and a half was not characterized by great changes - only a mild shift toward the youth-centric orientation was registered, that only denote the possibility that different young generations will appear. We can expect that, through the stabilization and development of the Croatian society, there will be more young with aspirations toward the youth-centric orientation, and an indication of this are: a certain increase of the number of those that wish to stay young and different from the older generation longer, those that think socio-economic independence is the main criterion of adulthood and those that recognize and accent the advantages of flexibility and the innovative potential of the young, along with the trend of moving the upper limit of youth into the thirties. In their relation toward youth and adulthood, the young are relatively homogenous, but there are some indicative differences. In this segment, the young mostly differ by their social origin (the youth-centric orientation grows with the father's level of education) and socio-professional status (students indicate a tendency toward the youth-centric concept). Age, the participant's education, place of residence, regional status and religious self identification have a sporadic and recognizably directed influence: the younger, of urban domicile, living in developed regions, more averagely educated, those not married and not religious are youth-centric - while the young at the end of their youth years, of rural residential status, living in undeveloped regions, with lower education, those married and considering themselves to be religious prefer the adult-centric orientation. From the group of the stated characteristics, it is obvious that the crucial influence belongs to the elements of traditionalism, still very present and, as such, able to determine the conception of youth even within today's young generation. The data that gender has no effect whatsoever on the relation of the young toward youth and adulthood is interesting and points to the fact that young women and men similarly experience youth and that the inclination toward postponing or accelerating the entrance into the world of adults is not related to the still existing, different patterns of socialization of genders. So, we could say that the pressure on the man to become socio-economically autonomous as soon as possible, and on the woman to get married and become a mother as early as possible, has weakened in the modern young generation. But, it is also possible that the young today are more successful in resisting these pressures, while being "helped" by the unstimulative social circumstances (most of all, unemployment). The perception of personal and social future of the young is constant - after the increase of pessimism at the end of 1980's, both pessimism and optimism are at the same level today they were in the mid 1980's. The discrepancy between the perception of the individual and the collective future is constant as well: the social future is, as a rule, perceived as less favorable than the personal future. This trend points to a certain lack of respect for reality, which can be explained by the fact that the real integration of the young into the society is yet to come, so their understanding of the connection between the personal and social destiny must be insufficient. But, the mature population is also not immune to trust its own forces - only with the approach of old age do people become more inclined to view their own future more pessimistically (because they are nearing their own biological end) than that of the society. Moderate optimism in the perception of the society's future is evenly arranged between all the observed sub-groups of the young, while the oldest, the unemployed and the employed and those which are married are a little more restrained toward (better) personal future than the rest are. It is obvious that pessimism grows parallel with the acceptance of certain permanent life roles, which implies that the integration into the world of adults does not give the benefits a part of the young people, were expecting. Whether this means that the young are socialized in the wrong way, by being given an idealized image of the future, or the actual circumstances are so unfavorable that they necessarily make the desired integration more difficult - stays an open question. Experience suggests that both factors must play and important role.

youth, adulthood, future

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