Refusing adulthood, How young people feel about being poor
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Refusing adulthood. Laurie Taylor talks to Susan Neiman, the American moral philosopher, who asks, if and why, some people refuse to grow up. She argues that being an adult allows the opportunity for agency and independence rather than signalling decline. Yet a modern tendency to idolise youth prevents us from seeing the rewards of maturity. They're joined by the writer, Michael Bywater, who wonders if we inhabit a culture of creeping infantilisation.
Also, how children and young people feel about being poor. Rys Farthing, social policy researcher, explores how young people living in low-income neighbourhoods feel about their own lives, using data generated as part of a participatory policy project with five groups of young people, aged 11-21.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much, |
| 0:06.2 | much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:12.3 | Hello. My son would have been about five years old when we took him on |
| 0:16.8 | holiday to Brittany. I remember that he particularly loved the the broad sandy |
| 0:20.9 | beach and he was delighted to learn that we were going to spend another day at |
| 0:23.7 | the seaside. But as we approached our destination, he suddenly grew apprehensive. |
| 0:28.6 | "'Mummy,' he said from the backseat in an alarmed voice, "''s Sunday, yes darling, what's the matter with that? |
| 0:35.2 | But won't the sea, |
| 0:36.3 | won't the sea be closed? |
| 0:38.3 | Well, it's a story which like all those stories, |
| 0:41.8 | aren't children funny stories that used to crop up so regularly |
| 0:44.7 | in the popular newspapers gives a parent such a satisfactory sense of superiority. |
| 0:50.4 | But a new paper shows that talking to children and all young people, can be about far more than collecting cute mistakes. |
| 0:57.0 | It might even have some concrete repercussions for policymaking. |
| 1:01.0 | That at least was the possibility which informed a new piece of research published in the journal, |
| 1:04.8 | Children and Society under the title, What's Wrong With Being Poor? The Problems of Poverty, as young people, |
| 1:11.5 | described them. |
| 1:12.6 | And its author is Reese Farting, who was formerly affiliated to the Department of Social |
| 1:16.0 | Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, and she's now with me. |
| 1:20.7 | This was, I mean you spoke to altogether, I think Reese you spoke to five different focus groups of young people in deprived areas up and down the country, Moss side in Manchester, Tower Hamlets in London, sort of median age of 14. But interesting, you found them all, but |
| 1:36.0 | how on earth do you get them to talk? Always a bit of a problem with children to |
| 1:39.0 | make them talk about their own life, their own conditions and |
... |
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