Topic Overview

The world around you greatly influences your behavior, but the strongest individual development takes place within the context of a supportive family. You will continue to develop and grow mentally and emotionally throughout your lifetime as you progress from your childhood family to creating your own.

Families of today are diverse. Many combine races, religions, or cultures. The importance of a family system, however, is universal. Whether you are a parent or child, brother or sister, bonded by bloodline or love, your experience through the family life cycle will affect who you are and who you become as well as your physical and emotional health.

The family life cycle consists of several developmental stages:

• Independence
• Coupling or marriage
• Parenting: babies through adolescents
• Launching adult children
• Retirement or senior stage of life

You must master the unique skills and developmental milestones of one stage before you can progress successfully to the next. Skills not learned in one stage become increasingly difficult to acquire in later stages and may interfere with achieving additional skills in the next phase.

The tools and knowledge that you gain during each phase may help you move smoothly through your family life cycle. The family life cycle theory suggests that successful transitioning may also help in preventing disease and emotional or stress-related disorders. If skills are not mastered, you may move on to the next phase of the cycle, but you are more likely to have difficulty with relationships, transitions, and physical and emotional wellness. But be assured, it is possible for you to attain missed skills and improve the quality of your life at any stage. You may discover missed skills through self-examination, education, or perhaps counseling.

The structure and function of a family changes as you move through the phases of marriage, raising children, launching children, and entering later life. Sometimes the stress associated with daily living or coping with a chronic medical condition will disrupt the normal cycle. Key developmental milestones may be missed when these disruptions occur and negatively impact future life cycle stages.

You may not realize when you have missed a key developmental milestone in your family life cycle. Sometimes, a crisis, such as a family member being diagnosed with a serious disease, can put normal transitioning on hold while you are dealing with the crisis. If the crisis is long-term, you and your family may move into the next stage without developing the life skills to succeed in a new phase. It is possible that stressful life events can lead to illness if you do not have the skills and social support you need.

Many external issues such as poverty, culture, divorce, and nontraditional family structure can have an impact on the family life cycle. Those issues will not be discussed at length here.