Youth transition, mobility, and intergenerationality: parental support and the school-to-work transition of Chinese returnees

While studies have revealed the importance of parental influence on youth transition and several channels for this influence, they have often analysed parental support as an individual variable unilaterally impacting youth. Instead, my study applies a relational approach to examine how Chinese youth with international tertiary education who return to China for employment perceive and negotiate parental support during their school-to-work transition. Drawing on qualitative interview data from 93 Chinese returnees, I examine how they negotiate parental career advice, job arrangements, and parents’ emotional and financial support in their school-to-work transition and manage intergenerational disagreements about career choices. The findings indicate that parental support for youth transition is a contested, relational process embedded in the socio-economic context of credential inflation, economic recession, and a precarious labour market and characterised by intergenerational ambivalence and complex emotionality. My study reveals the entanglement of youth mobility, transition, and intergenerationality and highlights the intersubjective reflection on and coproduction of youth transition.