Caregiver or worker

Abstract

This article examines how young women in community-based young mothers’ housing and employment programmes make job and career decisions while balancing school, work and family responsibilities in Canada. The research reveals that these young women's experiences are not reflected in the current academic and policy discourses about youth transitions and work. The analysis shows how broader social relations of gender and class shape the labour market conditions, caregiving responsibilities and understanding of ‘at risk’ youth through which young women's contradictory experiences of provisioning arise. Provisioning, an expanded notion of work, is used to reveal the dynamics of choice and risk underlying youth, labour and welfare policies and programmes that affect young women's working lives. It is argued that under the current social policy arrangements, ‘at risk’ young women end up making risky choices that effectively reinforce rather than transcend their marginalized status.