The changing transition to adulthood in twenty-first-century Lithuania : structural settings and contexts

Abstract

In Chapter 4, Sigita Kraniauskien? and Goda Damaševičiūtė examine the demographic features of the transition to adulthood of cohorts born in 1980-2000 and aim to evaluate the change of life-course patterns typical for Lithuania from a longer-time perspective - before and after the 1990s. Survey data reveals that the de-standardisation of family formation that began after the geopolitical transformations continues, but education or education-work transitions are of a more standardised nature. The chapter discusses the consequences of the transition from the Soviet standardised model to the post-Soviet individualised and (de/re)standardised one and to a current post-transformation ‘semi-standardised’ timetable for the transition to adulthood. The questions are: what normative life-course calendar do these processes reveal, and what do they allow us to understand about the direction of change in Lithuanian society? To what extent can we talk about convergence of life-course patterns with the West, or ‘path dependence’?