Discuss the Stages of a Family Life Cycle When Children Are Born Through Adolencesis Called

Topic Overview

What is a family life bicycle?

The emotional and intellectual stages you lot pass through from childhood to your retirement years every bit a fellow member of a family are called the family life bicycle. In each stage, yous face challenges in your family life that allow you to build or gain new skills. Gaining these skills helps you piece of work through the changes that about every family goes through.

Non everyone passes through these stages smoothly. Situations such every bit severe affliction, financial problems, or the death of a loved one can have an upshot on how well you pass through the stages. Fortunately, if you lot miss skills in one stage, you tin can acquire them in later stages.

The stages of the family life cycle are:

• Independence.
• Coupling or marriage.
• Parenting: babies through adolescents.
• Launching developed children.
• Retirement or senior years.

Why is it important to understand the family life cycle?

Mastering the skills and milestones of each stage allows you to successfully motility from i stage of development to the next. If you don't master the skills, you may withal motion on to the adjacent phase of the wheel, but you are more likely to have difficulty with relationships and future transitions. Family life bicycle theory suggests that successful transitioning may also help to prevent affliction and emotional or stress-related disorders.

Whether yous are a parent or child, brother or sister, bonded by blood or beloved, your experiences through the family unit life cycle volition affect who you are and who you become. The more you lot sympathise about the challenges of each stage of the bicycle, the more likely yous are to successfully move on.

What can disrupt the normal cycle?

The stress of daily living, coping with a chronic medical status, or other life crises can disrupt the normal life cycle. Ongoing stress or a crunch can filibuster the transition to the next phase of life. Or y'all may motility on without the skills that you lot need to easily adapt and transition to the next stage of life.

How can I improve my family unit life bicycle?

Be assured, you lot can larn missed skills and improve your and your family'south quality of life at any stage. Self-examination, pedagogy, and perhaps counseling are means to improve yourself and your family life. These are likewise actions that can help you lot manage other issues, too, such as going through a divorce or being a part of a nontraditional family structure.

Independence Stage

Independence is the about disquisitional stage of the family unit life wheel. As you enter young adulthood, you lot begin to separate emotionally from your family unit. During this phase, y'all strive to become fully able to support yourself emotionally, physically, socially, and financially. Yous brainstorm to develop unique qualities and characteristics that define your individual identity.

Intimacy is a vital skill to develop during your independent, young adult years. Intimacy is the power to develop and maintain close relationships that can endure hard times and other challenges. In an intimate human relationship, you learn nigh:

• Commitment.
• Commonality or similarity.
• Compatibility.
• Attachment.
• Dependence on another person who is not in your family.
• Shared emotion in a relationship.

Yous also learn who you are outside of your identity within your family unit. Your ability to develop an intimate human relationship depends on how successful y'all were at developing your individual identity earlier in life.

If you are a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered person (LGBT), this stage may include making your sexual orientation known, or "coming out" to your family and friends.

Exploring interests and career goals is function of developing independence. To live successfully away from your family, you must develop financial and emotional independence.

You also begin to be responsible for your own health in this phase. You go responsible for your nutritional, physical, and medical needs. Developing salubrious habits at this time—such equally good nutrition, regular exercise, and safer sexual activity practices—is of import for lifelong good wellness and happiness.

Yous learn new aspects of independence throughout your lifetime. Even when y'all take moved on to another stage of life, such as coupling, yous continue to learn independence inside the context of that stage.

During the independence stage, you hope to:

• Larn to see yourself equally a separate person in relation to your original family—parents, siblings, and extended family members.
• Develop intimate peer relationships exterior the family.
• Found yourself in your work or career.

Other of import qualities you develop during this phase include:

• Trust.
• Morals.
• Initiative.
• Work ethic.
• Identity, or who you lot are in the world.

Coupling Stage

The next stage in the family unit life cycle may be coupling. Using qualities such every bit trust that yous gained in the independence phase, you tin can explore your power to commit to a new family and a new way of life. Although being in an intimate relationship with someone does involve a procedure of adaptation and relationship building, a marriage or committed union often requires unique skills.

When you join families through a marriage or committed union, you lot grade a new family arrangement. Your family unit system includes your personal ideas, expectations, and values. These are shaped past the relationships and experiences with your original family. When yous marry or form a spousal relationship, y'all combine your family system with your spouse's or partner's. This requires reshaping your goals and your partner'due south goals. In the most functional relationships, partners have the ability to take two different points of view and create an pick that neither person had considered. It differs from a compromise in that it is not giving up something. Rather, it is creating a tertiary, meliorate option.

You may notice that some of the ideas or expectations that you lot held in the past are not realistic at this stage. Some mutual areas of adjustment include:

• Finances.
• Lifestyle.
• Recreational activities or hobbies.
• Relationships with in-laws.
• Sexuality or sexual compatibility.
• Friendships.
• Putting another person's needs before your own.

The ultimate goal at this stage is to achieve interdependence, which occurs when you are able to fully enter into a human relationship with some other person. Interdependence also requires that y'all share goals and that you lot are able to sometimes place the needs of another above your ain. Merely before you can achieve interdependence, y'all must start have a loftier degree of independence.

The relationship skills y'all acquire in coupling serve as a foundation for other relationships, such as parent-child, teacher-student, or medico-patient.

Within a couple, yous learn:

• Advanced interpersonal advice.
• Problem-solving skills.
• Common spiritual and emotional development goals.
• How to class boundaries in relationships.
• When to place the needs or importance of the other person above your own.

Most research shows that early on, a happy marriage is full of passion and sexual intimacy, which tin can become less important in later successful marriage. A satisfying wedlock at this stage includes a high amount of considerate or kind acts (such as doing something nice for the other person without being asked) and praise.

The life skills y'all learn in this stage are of import in developing true interdependence and the ability to have a cooperative and healthy relationship. Some of the challenges of this stage include:

• Transitioning into the new family unit system.
• Including your spouse or partner in your relationships with friends and family members.
• Being committed to making your matrimony work.
• Putting the needs of some other ahead of your own.

You and your partner will have less stress if the transition into a new family unit system is smooth. Less stress often means better health.

Your specific goals for this stage of the family life cycle are:

• Forming a new family with your partner.
• Realigning your relationships with your family unit of origin and your friends to at present include your spouse.

Parenting: Babies Through Adolescents

Making the decision to have a infant

At some point in your relationship, you lot and your partner will make up one's mind if yous want to have a infant. Some couples know going into a human relationship that they do not want children. Parenting is i of the most challenging phases of the family life bicycle.

The decision to have children is one that affects your individual evolution, the identity of your family, and your human relationship. Children are then fourth dimension-consuming that skills not learned in previous stages will be difficult to option upwardly at this stage. Your ability to communicate well, maintain your relationships, and solve issues is often tested during this phase.

Introducing a child into your family results in a major change in roles for you and your partner. Each parent has three distinct and enervating roles: as an private, a partner, and a parent. As new parents, your private identities shift along with how you relate to each other and to others. The skills that you learned in the Independence and Coupling stages, such as compromise and delivery, will help you lot motility to the Parenting stage.

Along with the joy that comes from having a kid, you may feel a groovy deal of stress and fear most these changes. A adult female might have concerns nigh beingness pregnant and going through childbirth. Fathers tend to keep their fears and stress to themselves, which can crusade health issues.

Talking about your emotional or physical concerns with your family doctor, obstetrician, or counselor can help you lot deal with these and time to come challenges.

Parenting young children

Adapting children into other relationships is a central emotional process of this stage. You volition take on the parenting role and transition from being a member of a couple to being a parent. While yous are withal evolving as individuals, you and your partner are also becoming decision-makers for your family. Standing to express your individuality while working well together as a couple results in a potent wedlock.

Your kid's healthy development depends on your ability to provide a safe, loving, and organized surroundings. Children do good when their parents have a strong human relationship.

Caring for young children cuts into the corporeality of time you lot might otherwise spend alone or with your partner. If yous did non fully develop some skills in previous phases, such as compromise for the practiced of the family, your human relationship may be strained. For instance, divorce or affairs may be more than likely to occur during the years of raising young children if parents have not developed potent skills from earlier life stages.

Merely for those who have the proper tools, this can be a very rewarding, happy time, fifty-fifty with all of its challenges. Optimally, you develop as an private, as a fellow member of a couple, and as a fellow member of a family unit.

Specific goals when immature children join your family are:

• Adjusting your marital system to make space for children.
• Taking on parenting roles.
• Realigning your relationships with your extended family to include parenting and grandparenting roles.

Parenting adolescents

Parenting teenagers tin can be a rough time for your family and can examination your relationship skills. It's too a fourth dimension for positive growth and creative exploration for your entire family. Families that function all-time during this period take potent, flexible relationships developed through good communication, trouble solving, mutual caring, support, and trust.

About teens experiment with dissimilar thoughts, beliefs, and styles, which can cause family unit conflict. Your strengths as an individual and as function of a couple are critical as yous deal with the increasing challenges of raising a teenager. Strive for a counterbalanced temper in which your teenager has a sense of support and emotional safety as well as opportunities to try new behaviors. An important skill at this stage is flexibility as yous encourage your child to go independent and artistic. Plant boundaries for your teenager, only encourage exploration at the same time. Teens may question themselves in many areas, including their sexual orientation and gender identities.

Considering of what you learned when you developed your identity in the before stages of life, you lot may feel more prepared and more secure about the changes your child is going through. But if y'all did non work through these skills at before stages of life, yous may feel threatened past your child's new developments.

Flexibility in the roles each person plays in the family organization is a valuable skill to develop at this stage. Responsibilities such equally the demands of a job or caring for someone who is ill may require each person in the family to take on various, and sometimes changing, roles.

This is a fourth dimension when one or more family unit members may experience some level of depression or other distress. It may also lead to physical complaints that take no physical cause (somatization disorders such as stomach upsets and some headaches) along with other stress-related disorders.

Nurturing your relationship and your private growth can sometimes be ignored at this stage. Toward the terminate of this stage, a parent'south focus shifts from the maturing teen to career and relationship. Neglecting your personal evolution and your relationship tin can make this shift difficult.

You lot also may brainstorm thinking most your office in caring for aging parents. Making your ain health a priority in this phase is helpful as you enter the adjacent stage of the family life cycle.

Specific goals during the stage of parenting adolescents include:

• Shifting parent-child relationships to let the child to move in and out of the family arrangement.
• Shifting focus back to your midlife relationship and career problems.
• Beginning a shift toward business organization for older generations in your extended family.

Empty Nest: Launching Developed Children

The stage of launching developed children begins when your kickoff kid leaves home and ends with the "empty nest." When older children get out home, there are both positive and negative consequences. If your family has developed significant skills through the family life cycle, your children will be prepare to exit dwelling house, ready to handle life's challenges. Free from the everyday demands of parenting, you lot may choose to rekindle your own relationship and possibly your career goals.

Developing adult relationships with your children is a cardinal skill in this stage. You may exist challenged to take new members into your family through your children's relationships. Y'all may focus on reprioritizing your life, forgiving those who take wronged you (maybe long agone), and assessing your behavior well-nigh life.

If you struggled with previous life phases, your children may non have learned from you all the skills they need to live well on their own. If you and your partner have not transitioned together, yous may no longer feel uniform with each other. But recollect that you can however gain the skills you may take missed. Self-examination, didactics, and counseling tin enhance your life and help ensure a healthy transition to the next phase.

This is a time when your wellness and energy levels may decline. Some people are diagnosed with chronic illnesses. Symptoms of these diseases can limit normal activities and fifty-fifty long-enjoyed pastimes. Health issues related to midlife may begin to occur and can include:

• High blood pressure (hypertension).
• Weight problems.
• Arthritis.
• Menopause.
• Osteoporosis.
• Heart affliction (coronary avenue disease).
• Depression.
• Stress-related illnesses.

Yous may also be caring for aging parents in this phase, which can exist stressful and bear on your own wellness.

Specific goals to reach at this phase include:

• Refocusing on your relationship without children.
• Developing adult relationships with your grown children.
• Realigning relationships to include in-laws and grandchildren when your children begin their ain families.

Retirement or Senior Stage of Life

During the retirement phase of the family life cycle, many changes occur in your life. Welcoming new family members or seeing others get out your family is often a large part of this stage as your children marry or divorce or you get a grandparent.

This stage tin can be a smashing risk where you are free from the responsibilities of raising your children and can simply relish the fruits of your life'south work. Challenges you may face include being a support to other family unit members, even as you are still exploring your own interests and activities or focusing on maintaining your relationship. Many people are caring for elderly parents at this time. You lot may experience challenged by their emotional, financial, and concrete needs while trying to help them go on their independence.

You may feel declining physical and mental abilities or changes in your financial or social status. Sometimes y'all must deal with the death of other family members, including your partner. The quality of your life, in office, depends on how well you adjusted to the changes in earlier stages. It often also depends on how well you accept cared for your own health upward to this betoken. Normal aging will touch on your trunk, resulting in wrinkles, aches, pains, and loss of bone density. The chances of having a mental or chronic physical illness increases with age. But aging does not mean you will automatically experience poor health.

Retirement can exist a fulfilling and happy time. Becoming a grandparent can bring you great joy without the responsibleness of raising a child. Only those who are without adequate back up systems or not well off financially may have a more than difficult time in this phase of life.

Specific goals to accomplish for at this final stage of your family life bicycle include:

• Maintaining your ain interests and physical operation, along with those of your partner, as your body ages.
• Exploring new family and social roles.
• Providing emotional support for your adult children and extended family members.
• Making room in the family organisation for the wisdom and experience of older adults.
• Providing support for the older generation without doing also much for them.
• Dealing with the loss of a partner, siblings, and other peers, and preparing for your own death.
• Reviewing your life and reflecting on all you have learned and experienced during your life cycle.

References

Other Works Consulted

• McGoldrick Chiliad, et al., eds. (2011). The Expanded Family Life Cycle: Individual, Family, and Social Perspectives, 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
• Newman BM, Newman PR (2012). Development Through Life: A Psychosocial Approach, 11th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
• Rentfro AR (2010). Wellness promotion and the family. In CL Edelman, CL Mandle, eds., Health Promotion Throughout the Lifespan, 7th ed., pp. 171–199. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Mosby.

Credits

Current as of: Baronial 31, 2020

Writer: Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:
Anne C. Poinier Physician - Internal Medicine
Kathleen Romito Dr. - Family Medicine
Adam Husney MD - Family Medicine

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Source: https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/ty6171

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