Lifelines

This research explores young people’s imagined futures with a specific focus on family life, friendships and intimate relationships.

The changing nature of contemporary family life, the contingency and comparative frailty of intimate human relationships and the ascendancy of friendship (in the place of fragmenting family relationships) are key themes in the sociology of family literature (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Jamieson 1998; Pahl & Pevalin 2005). In New Zealand, as in other similar liberal welfare states, these themes might, in part, explain a number of trends that have consolidated over the past 30 years: declining fertility rates and longer life expectancies in some but not all population groups; the normalisation of divorce and remarriage as life-course events; the removal of legal constraints on same-sex relationships; an increase in non-marital partnerships; an increase in the number of children who experience living with either one parent or parents living across different households; and an increase in couple-only households (Dharmalingam, Pool & Sceats 2007; Ministry of Social Development 2004).

In this research, we explored young people’s imagined futures with a specific focus on family life, friendships and intimate relationships. LifeLines – stories written in response to a guided writing exercise – were collected from 100 Year 13 students, aged 16–18 years, from a range of metropolitan, provincial and rural New Zealand secondary schools. Of the 100 LifeLines collected, 77 were written by young women and 23 by young men. A narrative analysis of the LifeLines was completed that identified the ways in which young people make sense of family, friendship and intimacy, and how they imagine they might live their lives in the context of these meanings.

The guided writing exercise asked participants to describe themselves now, at 80 years of age and in four intervening time periods. In completing the narrative analysis, a number of imagined life events clustered into phases: Self Discovery (present–early 20s); Starting Out (18–25 years); A Thriving Family (25–40 years); Maturing Family Life (40–55 years); and Happy Old Age (55–80 years).

The key finding of this research is that young people’s imagined futures are structured by a dominant narrative: a Happy, Stable and Contented Life. Young people generally imagine that their lives will turn out well.

Central to the happy, stable and contented life is a life-long intimate relationship through which emotional and material security is achieved. In the happy, stable and contented life, this relationship is formed relatively early in the life-course (usually in the mid to late twenties) and continues to shape the experience of each phase of the narrator’s life. Young people imagine the formation of their families of procreation as occurring sometime during the starting out and thriving family phases, and their children are typically imagined as having similarly happy, stable and contented lives. Indeed, their children’s lives are similarly characterised by academic and career success, and by successfully forming future families that produce the narrators’ imagined grandchildren.

This report was produced for the Families Commission Blue Skies Fund by Lesley Patterson, Robin Peace, Bronwyn Campbell and Christy Parker.