The concept of youth essay sample

The concept of youth in sociology Why its not so easy to define the concept of youth? Actually, its a quite challenging question to find a clear definition of who exactly adolescents are, because in different countries groups of young people may have various educational, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, needs, challenges, and interests. This concept covers a diverse area because according to social categories, the word youth describes a period between a childhood and adulthood. During this period, young people get prepared to the adult social collective and learn to adjust to the life in general. Needless to say that while people get adults, they find themselves in complicated situations connected with different sides of life, including traditions, history, hopes, and individual prospects. The adolescents need to learn a lot about their new social roles and accept main norms of modern society. According to the famous sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, youth is a quite necessary component in the society. Different institutions give us quite different definitions of youth people age; for example, the UN defines youth as people between 15 and 24, when the Nepal Youth Policy says that youth people are persons between 16 and 40. But of course, the definition shouldnt be completed by only age. Other important things such as motivation, goals, personal needs, etc. Young people are certainly not children that need that care and protection anymore, but this group of people still need some additional care because they are not able to have all opportunities and possibilities as adults. Youth is a social group of our society that develops and improves constantly. According to Eisenstadt, the certain age links to the role expectations; it means that things we expect from a person of 18 years old are quite different with those we expect for example, from a person of 30 years old. Of course, age is a prevailing approach to define youth, but apart from this, such things as life situations and social status can be also important in defining. Youth and history If to remember history, in the middle ages people didnt have a definition of â€Å"youth† because a child from 7 years and older was classified as an adult, so kids were working hard from early ages and didnt have a childhood. In current times, we live with quite another social gradations, traditions and rules. At the beginning of 20th century, youth people were evolved as a general societal norm set by pedagogical and psychological efforts to define stages of people development. During the years, the period of youth was prolonged due to changing of social structures. The main goal of youth development is a smooth and slow integration into the society by fulfilling a lot of tasks such as living independent from parents, choosing the future profession, developing a gender role and building relationship with a partner. Nowadays, youth is a subject that should be protected against the dangers of freedom and taken care of by society, but in the same way, we need to encourage the y oung people strong and valuable qualities. Its really not so easy to define youth because this social group is quite complex and diverse. There are a lot of sociological explanations of this definition, and their beliefs and values can be different. When we try to define youth as an age, then its just a word, but if we look at the youth as its an element of society, then it is a social group. There is a lack of formally accepted and unique definition of youth in all national policies, but a recognized framework refers adolescents between certain groups according to age. Its understandable that age gap varies for different countries due to many reasons, including geography, country policy settings, and socio-cultural patterns. In general, the concept of youth is hard to define because its impossible to find the common definition, and all sociologists define this concept in various, but right ways.