Family life cycle

Family Life-Cycle: The emotional and intellectual stages you pass through from childhood to your retirement years as a member of a family are called the family life-cycle. In each stage, you face challenges in your family life that cause you to build or gain new skills. Gaining these skills helps you work through the changes that nearly every family goes through. Following are different stages of the Family Life-Cycle:

(i) Behaviour in Family: At this stage husband and wife gain knowledge about different habits, values and beliefs. They also learn to establish the coordination amongst themselves.

(ii) Understanding Children’s Behaviour: In this stage the married couple gains the knowledge about upbringing of the kids. Due to the birth of the child in the family there are some certain changes occur regarding the economic status of the family.

(iii) Families with Pre-school Children: At this stage parents mainly focus on the development of the child. They also learn about the needs and desires of the children.

(iv) Families with School-going Children: At this stage the children are sent to the school and the family will be responsible for their educational development.

(v) Families with Adolescents: At this stage the family has to take care about the freedom of the adolescents. Their role is to work as a coordinator in creating coordination amongst different factors related to adolescents.

(vi) Family as a Transitional Centre: At this stage the parents feel loneliness as children are busy in their professional tasks and earning livelihood. At this stage it is really essential to teach children along with their parents the various social and cultural virtues.

(vii) Launching Children and Moving on: This is one of the transitions that can be most emotionally difficult for parents as they now need to accept a multitude of exits from and entries into the family system. If the choices of the children leaving the nest are compatible with the values and expectations of the parents, the transition can be relatively easy and enjoyable, especially if the parents successfully navigate their second-order changes, such as renegotiation of the marital system as a couple rather than as simply parents.

(viii) Families in Later Years: When Erikson discusses this stage, he focuses on how we as individuals either review our lives with acceptance and a sense of accomplishment or with bitterness and regret. A family systems approach, however, is interested in how the family as a unit responds and sees the key emotional principle as accepting the shifting of generational roles. Second-order changes require us to maintain our own interests and functioning as a couple in face of physiological decline. We shift our focus onto the middle generation (the children who are still in stage five) and support them as they launch their own children. In this process the younger generation needs to make room for the wisdom and experience of the elderly, supporting the older generation without over-functioning for them. Other second order change includes dealing with the loss of our spouse, siblings, and others peers and the preparation for our own death and the end of our generation.  

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