According to Stanley Kauffmann, scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini and director Vittorio de Sica got their ideas for depicting contemporary youth in A Young World by visiting the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and there looking at nouvelle vagueeries.

Critic Kauffmann regards as sad this stategem by which two sixty-four-year-olds hoped to disguise the second-hand quality of their projected truckle to the most numerous portion of today's movie-goers (the young).

I don't think it's any sadder than what de Sica and Zavattini have been doing throughout their entire collaboration, and in saying this I do include Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan, Umberto D and all their other films. Seen today, without the intellectual hoopla with which they were launched, and subsequently promoted in leftist-dominated film societies, all Zavattini-Sica films have the same basic faults as their latest, A Young World, does—i.e., a conscienceless use of hackneyed sentimentality...