Navigating Risk Discourses: a Narrative Analysis of Parental Experiences in the Career and Life Development of Youth not in Education, Employment, or Training Siu-ming To, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 11 February 2020 /Accepted: 29 June 2020/ # The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract Although the career and life development needs of young people not in education, employment, or training (NEET) have garnered interest from researchers and policymakers in recent decades, how parents experience their NEET children’ s devel- opment and how they make meaning of their parental journeys remain underexplored. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine such parents’ experiences with their NEET children’ s career and life development by conducting individual, semi-structured interviews with such parents, particularly in the Chinese cultural context of Hong Kong. Fourteen parents of NEET youth in Hong Kong were recruited via purposive sampling, each of whose NEET child was between 15 and 21 years old. Using narrative thematic analysis of interviews for data analysis, the results revealed that the parents had experienced a range of negative emotions and relied upon both contemporary and cultural conceptualizations of career, risk, and parenting to make sense of their chil- dren’ s circumstances. Whereas some parents blamed themselves or their children for their negative experiences, others attempted to reinterpret their parenting decisions and actions, as well as their children’ s career and life challenges, by reconstructing their personal meanings of parenthood. The results suggest that the parents’ self-perceptions and well-being were subject to the influence of risk discourses on parenting. They also suggest that though macro- and micro-environments were liable to heavily influence the parents’ self-perceptions, parents who could reconstitute their reflexive selves were more likely than others to form more positive views of themselves, their children, and their parental journeys. Keywords NEET youth . Parents . Career development . Life outcomes . Hong Kong . Narrative analysis Introduction Career and life development can be significant, complex processes not only for young people but for their parents as well. To date, research has tended to focus on the relationships between parents’ involvement and expectations with regard to their Applied Research in Quality of Life https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-020-09855-w