Life Course Regime in Lithuania: What Is It and Do We Follow It?

The life course of a contemporary person is strongly influenced not only by family, work and social networks, but also by the social policy of a particular country. Welfare state policies – social protection, education, healthcare, employment and housing – cover the whole of a person's life from cradle to grave. Life course regimes determined by policies and a country's socio-economic and cultural context have been studied by scholars all over the world, and Lithuania is no exception. A study conducted by researchers from Vilnius University (VU) and Klaipėda University (KU) has shown that the life course of the Lithuanian population is segmented and mostly work-oriented. It is therefore important to understand what life choices these regimes dictate, especially when it comes to young people's transition to adulthood.

The life course regime is the overall logic of the life course in each country, which reflects, or even is dictated by, that country's institutional structure. How does such a regime emerge and work? Social policy frameworks link different stages and phases of life. For example, education at a young age improves life chances in adulthood, i.e. certain actions increase the probability of other actions. The eligibility rules of the pension system define the minimum duration of work and contribution records for each person. For those who meet the requirements, the pension system provides the financial security in old age, as well as the certainty about the future. Other social policies – unemployment insurance, maternity/paternity insurance, occupational injury insurance, health insurance, social assistance and personal social services – make it possible to sustain the usual way of life in the event of loss of one' s job, an injury, illness, the birth of a child, or other event. Having rules and institutions in place provides clarity and social security. On the other hand, they set out requirements, conditions, outline a certain socially desirable life course trajectory and contribute to the formation of social norms. For example, when, how much and under what circumstances one should study, work, care for a sick family member, start a family or have children.Transformation of life course regimes in Europe: from strictly standardised to destandardised lives?

It is not surprising that life course regimes are many and varied, and that they change over time. Western scholars distinguish between the following stages in the evolution of life course regimes: pre-industrial, industrial, Fordist and post-industrial. Historically, industrialisation in the first half of the 20th century saw a shift towards a more standardised, politicised and institutionalised life course. The mass movement from rural to urban areas increased the importance of social policies and institutions in people's lives, as well as the power of these institutions to shape the course of people's lives, and to chart similar individual life course trajectories. However, the late 20th century witnessed a transformation of post-industrial societies towards more destandardized, depoliticized and reinstitutionalized lives, as well as individualized and highly diversified life course trajectories. Social policies became more flexible, offering more alternatives, less paternalistic, with redesigned institutions and rules.

For example, childcare benefits are increasingly flexible. Currently, childcare benefits in Lithuania can be paid until the child reaches the age of two, and can be used flexibly not only by parents, but also by grandparents. The second year of childcare leave offers the flexibility to combine work and childcare: childcare benefits are not reduced while working. The social security system is also adapting to the changing labour market: childcare benefits have been made available to the self-employed for several years. Childcare benefits have also recently been introduced in Lithuania for students and apprentices without sufficient insurance contribution records. Until recently, all these options were unavailable and childcare responsibilities often fell on the mother's shoulders, while men had to perform the traditional role of breadwinners.

Lithuania, like other developed countries, is currently in the post-industrial period. However, the establishment of this period in Lithuania was somewhat delayed, i.e. not in the 1970s, but in the 1990s, during the transition from a planned to free market economy. Also, during the transition from the strict and paternalistic life course policy of the USSR, the institutions of independent Lithuania were being actively reformed and oriented towards the Western welfare state model. It should be noted that the newly developed social policies have been and are operating in the unstable context of 1990–2022: the hyper-inflation of the 1990s, the Russian crisis of 2000, the financial crisis of 2009, the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and the war in Ukraine in 2022 are periods of great insecurity and uncertainty that have particularly affected young people of working age and have shaped, are shaping, and will continue to shape the choices they make about the way they live their lives during the transition to adulthood. The only question is – shaping in which direction?

Life course regime in Lithuania: segmented social security and orientation towards work

The analysis carried out by VU and KU researchers shows that Lithuania has features of a poorly integrated “segmented protection” life course regime. “Segmented protection” refers to a relatively extensive and wide-ranging social insurance system and underdeveloped social protection for groups outside it. This dualism in the Lithuanian social insurance system is reinforced by the strong dominance of the work orientation that has persisted since the full employment society of the Soviet era. Another legacy of the Soviet era is the powerful mechanisms that structure behaviour and shape norms, especially through education. Finally, when it comes to norms regarding gender, on the one hand, there is a strong conservative tradition in Lithuania, but on the other hand, there is the degenderisation that comes from the Soviet era, especially in the area of women's employment, where the vast majority of women are active in the labour market.

Such a system guides young people towards a steady transition from school to vocational or higher education institutions, then to the labour market, and only then to starting a family. Social security in old age is only guaranteed if you have a required length of social insurance contribution records, and for those who do not participate in the social insurance system, only very small pensions are available. The latter currently amount to EUR 173 per month. This is in stark contrast to the much more universal Scandinavian model of the welfare state, where basic social security guarantees are much more developed and extended to all citizens.
Destandardisation of the younger generation's life course in Lithuania is only partial

Comparing cohorts ­– groups of people born in different years ­­– allows us to assess the transformation of a life course. This change can be illustrated, for example, by the age of the first major events that mark adulthood: separation from the parental family, the end of education, the start of a working career, starting a family. Looking at the age at which 25%, 50%, 75% of the cohort experienced a particular event, it is possible to see whether there have been changes in young people's behaviour and life courses. According to the 2018–2021 Family and Inequality Survey in Lithuania, the life course of young men and women born between 1970 and 1989 has changed to some extent.

The most significant changes relate to family formation behaviour – marriage and having children have been and continue to be postponed. They occur at very different ages, especially among men. The experience of these events is not universal and clichéd, but very individual and destandardised. Only half of men and women born after 1980 experienced these events before the age of 35. It is also true that first partnerships (mostly cohabitation) are delayed, yet a significantly higher proportion of those born after 1980 have attempted cohabitation rather than marriage.Interestingly, this behaviour is at odds with the prevailing view of the ideal age to marry and have a first child. Data from the 2019 European Social Survey show that those born between 1970 and 1989 are fairly unanimous on the ideal age for marriage and childbearing, which is much earlier than the figures presented here. Women in these cohorts reported an ideal age for cohabitation for women of around 21–22 years, an ideal age for marriage of around 24 years and an ideal age for having children of around 24–25 years. Correspondingly, men reported an ideal age of cohabitation for men of around 22–23 years, an age of marriage of around 24–28 years and an age of having children of around 26–28 years. Thus, although real behaviour in society is individualised, destandardised and highly varied, there is a more or less uniform, universal standard of behaviour in people's minds, even if it is not followed.

Data from the Family and Inequality Survey showed that the age at the end of education and the age when young people start working (for at least 6 months) for both men and women born between 1970 and 1989 remained essentially unchanged. These events are consistently experienced at a very similar age, around 19–24 years, in both younger and older cohorts. These are the most time-compressed – standardised events. And they have become especially so in younger cohorts of women.Therefore, we can say that the transition to adulthood in Lithuania continues to experience not only destandardisation and individualisation, but also some standardisation. Even the age of the first departure from the parental home, although it tends to be postponed in the long run, yet not as significantly as family formation events. Home leaving postponement applies more to people from the youngest cohort, those born from 1980 onwards.

The study has shown that the postmodern changes in the life course of the cohorts born after 1980 in our country do not yet show a general unidirectional trend towards a highly diverse, destandardised and individualised experience of becoming an adult. To some extent, there is also a certain standardisation of adulthood behaviour in education and careers, as a result of living in a “segmented protection” life course regime. On the one hand, this shows that life in Lithuania remains relatively stable and structured, but on the other hand, our welfare state system and social policy are not yet sufficiently developed, do not offer sufficient flexibility and still dictate a rather rigidly defined life course. The latter is more typical for industrial societies, rather than for our post-modern reality. Moreover, the increasing diversity of partnership and family formation age of men and women paradoxically reflects the increasing similarity of life course by gender. This is obviously also linked to "segmented social protection", which pushes a large proportion of young people to finish their education first, join the labour market and only then to start a family.

This article has been prepared in the framework of a project funded by the Research Council of Lithuania “Growing up in Independent Lithuania: Life Courses of 1980-2000 Cohorts, Behavioral Strategies and their Contexts" (S-MIP-21-19). Data from the Family and Inequality Survey from the EU-funded project "Families, Inequalities and Demographic Processes" under Agreement No. 09.3.3.-LMT-K-712-01-0020 with the Research Council of Lithuania, as well as from the European Social Survey, wave 9 (data release 2.0), 2018–2019.