Youth and the home

The home plays an important role in people's lives as a key site for personal development. While some people are able to spend vast sums of money styling their homes, for others the maintenance of home, both physically and emotionally, remains a daily struggle. Since the home is not only a physical space but also a symbolic concept and a contested site, connotations of home vary widely both culturally and over time. As Alison Blunt and Ann Varley (2004, 3) claim, geographies of home "are located on thresholds between memory and nostalgia for the past, everyday life in the present, and future dreams and fears." The home is where young people form many of their values and ideals, but it is also a place where they struggle over power relations. The concepts of home and youth are closely connected, as it is often only on moving out of their childhood home that young people are considered to have become adults.