Youth's Activity in Changing Reality: Self-Regulation Contradictions

The article substantiates the socio-cultural approach to the study of self- regulation contradictions of youth's activity. The developed approach considers the process of forming the meanings that determine the content orientation of self-regulation contradictions in changing reality. As a source for youth's development, the authors analyze contradictions between cultural and social, unconscious and conscious, traditional and modern, objective and subjective. The researchers carry out the empirical testing of the developed concept on the basis of the study results in relation to education, labor and family. Both conservative and constructive components become evident in the clash of culture and the social. The conservative component is associated with situations of various forms of economic restrictions, while the constructive one is related to rationalizing youth's attitude to education, labor and family, and searching for alternative ways to resolve contradictions. The contradiction between the unconscious and the conscious manifests itself as a conflict of essences - terminal, self-valuable, instrumental and rational attitude to the objects of reality. The contradiction between the traditional and the modern appears in different ways in education, labor, and family. In education, traditional educational values are devalued; there are no conditions for strengthening the modern ones. In labor, the historically formed contradiction of its instrumental and terminal essence persists. In family relations, there is a sharp discrepancy between the youth's desire for modern forms of family creation and the traditional forms that dominate in the society. The contradiction between the objective and the subjective in various spheres reflects the existing problems of objective reality and the subjective youth's attitude toward them. Empirically, the authors analyze the contradictions based on the results of comparative sociological studies conducted in 2014 and 2017.