Shining the light of experience on the transition from child to adult

The capacity to stand back and say ‘go for it yourself’ is an important gesture of parental empowerment, writes Terry Prone

Y company gets a constant stream of applications for internships, from transition year students and those at third level. They want to work for us for a week. Two weeks. A month. Three months. Exposure to the glamour, excitement, and pressure of our best-in-class business will — they tell us in their begging emails — set them up for life.

They approach it in quite different ways, which had escaped us until we thought, in the last week, that we should do a little research into it. Transition year, you see, is the least documented social experiment in Ireland. It’s all anecdotal. Binary. Yes/no. Black and white. At least as far as parents are concerned.