The Influence of the Family on the Value of Training Pathways in Young NEETS: a Qualitative Study in an Area of Southern Italy

This article discusses the link between training pathways, young NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and their parents’ attitude towards education, starting from a qualitative study carried out in an area of Southern Italy. The need to focus on NEETs, and in particular the link between training courses, young people and the family, comes from the need to consider the Italian peculiarity of the phenomenon, which in recent years has emerged in all its complexity. The study starts with the importance that young NEETs and their families give to training courses in the context of their biographies. This occurs within a framework in which the relationship between education and work changes due to the flexibility of work: on the one hand, the working system requires more and more adaptability and high levels of training, while on the other, training courses do not always manage to guarantee training that facilitates the transition into the world of work (Blossfeld et al. 2005, Blossfeld, 2014). The analysis of the results shows how the young people interviewed perceive training mainly as an “obligation” and not as a benefit. They are young people who live in a dimension of habituation to the context, perpetually waiting, within a family stuck in an attitude of deresponsibilisation which, in the illusion of respecting their choices, makes them feel more alone than free.