Background

A flourishing and prosperous society is dependent on healthy, educated, and resilient young people with the life skills to become thriving adults. The factors that shape long-term health and wellbeing exert their influence from an early stage. Ensuring a thriving adult population in the future depends on providing the necessary support and conditions for young people in the here and now. The influence of social determinants on long-term health outcomes is largely accepted and understood by those working in health and social policy. However, the implications of this are less well understood by decision makers across other sectors and the wider public. The social determinants approach to health emphasises the importance of creating the conditions that promote good long-term health outcomes across the life course and acting early in life to increase people’s ability to build the foundations needed to thrive.

We know early socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to later health outcomes (Warren, 2009). But we do not know much about how this works in the 12-24 age period, nor what happens when we focus directly on the assets young people are accumulating. Some of the more traditional supports and safety nets (such as a buoyant youth labour market and access to welfare benefits) are not as available to today’s young people compared to previous generations. There is a sense that some of them may be transitioning into adulthood with fewer ‘assets’ or ‘resources’ to help them weather the storms as they age, and that this will be related to their later health outcomes as older adults. Thus, the rationale for this study developed as follows:

• The Health Foundation took as its starting point the work of Naomi Eisenstadt on Life Chances of Young People in Scotland (2017) and defined the foundations of a healthy life as:
 The potential to engage in good quality work
 Access to secure, affordable homes in flourishing communities
 A network of stable, supportive relationships and good social and emotional
wellbeing, and
 Established habits that promote and maintain good health.

• An engagement exercise then worked with young people themselves to identify the assets which they felt had contributed to their current situation across the 4 foundations. These assets were defined as:

 Skills and qualifications - “how right my skills are for the career I want”;
 Personal connections - “the confidence and connections to navigate the adult world”;
 Financial and practical support - “having the support to achieve what I want from life”,
 Emotional support - “people I can lean on emotionally

• The state of health and health behaviours in early adulthood (mid 20s) is likely to be related to later health outcomes. If poor habits and health outcomes are already emerging by this age, they are likely to persist.

• It seems possible that at least some of today’s young people have the odds stacked against them in terms of their experiences 12-24, compared with (a) their current peers, and (b) previous generations.

• If we knew more about how to support young people aged 12-24, helping them to enter the mid-20s in a state of positive wellbeing, then we can work to protect their future health outcomes.

Rather than focusing on parental SES, this study will be unique in looking at the assets accumulated by the young people themselves that they then take on with them into the next life stage. However we will examine whether there are interactions between parental SES and young people’s assets, enabling us to identify whether assets (when present) are differentially protective for young people from differing SES families.