ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, the health of young people barely featured on the social and health policy agendas of national and international institutions, (re)affirming a widespread but fallacious assumption that youth and health go hand in hand (Bennett 1985). The assumption was sustained both by the paucity of research specifically focused on young people’s health, and by the use of wide age bands (e.g. 0-16, 16-64 years) in official statistics, the effect of which typically rendered ‘youth’ invisible. Twenty years on, the situation could hardly be more different. Youth and health are now firmly on the policy and research agendas of most governments in the developed world, reflecting the widespread view that young people’s physical and mental health has deteriorated over time, and without urgent action will continue to deteriorate. This dramatic change in the significance attributed to young people’s health has all the
ingredients of another moral panic about youth, raising questions as to whether the claim of deterioration is real or not. Yet it has also occurred during a period of rapid social change, raising equally important questions as to what constellation of factors in late modernity might explain it. On the face of it, it is perplexing since it is not consistent with a simple materialist explanation; the populations of most developed societies have become richer, not poorer, over this period of time. Of course, what happens at a population level is not necessarily reflected in the material circumstances of youth, the evidence for which might be better indicated by trends in pocket money, youth unemployment or student debt. However, it does direct attention to a range of other factors including changes in family structure and functioning, education and the labour market, all of which can profoundly shape the transition from childhood through youth to adulthood, and in turn impact on health. In late modernity, it also highlights the potential importance of newer, ‘postmodern’, influences associated with consumerism and the media, which shape youth identities, youth cultures and lifestyles, and which may equally impact on health. Against this background, the aim in this chapter is to provide a profile of health in
youth together with evidence on time trends, to identify the principal social correlates,
and how changes in these might explain changes in young people’s health. To do this, we must first define what we mean by two key concepts: health and youth.
