The various stages of family life cycle.

Q.1. Describe the various stages of family life cycle.

Family life cycle Just as human beings pass through various stages of life cycle from childhood to adulthood to old age, in a similar way families also pass through various stages. Family life cycle begins with independence stage to marriage of two people. In various stages of family life cycle.It has expansion phase as children are born and reared and again gets contracted with children starting their own independent life, settled in career and married off and old couple staying alone.

Though this family life cycle has remained more applicable to western and urban societies where nuclear families are the norm of the day and neo-local pattern is commonly observed where married couples begin their life independent of the parent families. This family life cycle model does not fit in adequately in the case of joint family, extended family or even alternate family patterns. Pertaining to Indian socio-cultural context, this family life cycle approach does not have wide applicability. Nevertheless, it gives an important understanding of the needs and resources, tangible and intangible, that individual family members require in meeting the demands of family and society and executing their roles effectively. Added to this, it may not be necessary that all the families, more so all nuclear families, pass through all these stages of family life cycle in the same sequence various stages of family life cycle.

A family life cycle may be defined as the emotional and intellectual stages one passes through from childhood to retirement years as a member of a family. The stages of the family life cycle are:

·         Independence.

·         Coupling or Initiation into family life stage. 

·         Parenting or Expansion of family stage.

Retirement and empty nest or Contraction stage of family life cycle. Before moving further, let us look at the relevance of studying family life cycle and also understand its applicability. There would be certain common reference points in understanding various stages of family. The family life cycle approach is more applicable to the middle class nuclear families. Those families living below poverty line often fail to accomplish many tasks related to growth and development of individual family members. Alternate family patterns like women headed families, dual Income No Kid families also do not pass through all the stages of family life cycle as given below. Joint family patterns also have different functioning and coping abilities on account of its composition, life-style and functioning.

Independence Stage

 Independence stage is basically the preparation stage to enter the family life cycle. It is one of the most crucial stages as later adjustments and successful completion of roles expected depends on this stage. As individuals enter young adulthood, they begin to separate emotionally from their family. During this stage, the persons strive to seek full independence — emotionally, physically, socially, and financially. They begin to develop unique qualities and characteristics that define their individual identity. By this time major boys and girls tend to have their own identity, preferences, likes and dislikes. They learn to accept responsibility, accomplish major tasks independently and try achieving self reliance in financial matters. You may recall Erickson’s sixth stage of psycho-social development — various stages of family life cycle. Intimacy and Solidarity vs. Isolation that coincides with independence stage of family life cycle. Individuals, at this stage, try to find and maintain mutually satisfying relationships, primarily through marriage and friends. Intimacy is a vital skill to develop during the independent, young adult years.

Initiation Stage :

Coupling After independence stage, the next stage in the family life cycle is coupling. The couples explore their ability to commit to a new family and a new way of life. Being in a committed relationship with someone in the institution of marriage does involve a process of adaptation and relationship building. Marriage often requires unique skills. After marriage, quite often, a girl either moves to the family of her husband or the couple set up a new household various stages of family life cycle. In the former set up, a girl has to make adjustments with many more relationships along with husband. These are in-laws, husband’s kith and kin. Initial period of gestation calls for many adjustments by newly wed couple as well as family members. Especially in the case of old parents, marriage of son leads to a feeling of insecurity and loss of undivided attention and love of son, as they have to ‘share’ their son with the daughter-in-law. These feelings of insecurity and alienation are unconsciously reflected in their faultfinding behaviour in the bahu. The new bride too finds it difficult to adjust to the new customs and lifestyles of family members of the new family. This transitioning into the new family system may require alterations into the mental images, ideologies, value systems that the girl is socialized with.

If spouses understand the constraints and frustrations of work place and roles related to family functioning is democratically divided with flexibility and attitude of care for each other, then it ensures well-being of both the partners. However, various stages of family life cycle, in the case of families, where husband tries to continue patriarchal and autocratic lifestyle expecting from his working wife to strike a perfect balance between work and home management, puts the wife in role strain and stress. In the coupling stage, husband and wife, compared to other stages of family life cycle, have ample time resource which they can spend in making their relationship strong, establishing democratic family norms, caring and sharing, making goals for family enhancement and career development. Similarly, couple being young, have plenty of energy resource too, which they can utilize in economic as well as creative pursuits. The young couple has comparatively greater money resource as they generally do not have many responsibilities to shoulder upon.

Expansion Stage :

Parenting Parenting is one of the most challenging phases of the family life cycle. The time span of this stage is generally the longest. In Indian context, commonly, purpose of marriage is to continue progeny. In fact, it is said that without child(ren) a family is never complete. Childlessness is considered a curse. Similarly becoming parent out of wedlock is also a taboo, especially for women.

In majority of families, if wife doesn’t become pregnant within two years of marriage, elderly in the family and neighbourhood start commenting and questioning her fertility. Further, impact of patriarchal social structure is so ingrained that girl child is rarely accepted with the same love and joy as boys. Various stages of family life cycle, In Indian culture, often couples don’t discuss about their sexuality and even planning the babies. It is primarily the decision of the husbands to use a family planning method or not. There are many complex sociocultural issues associated with sexuality in India. Talking about sex is considered a taboo. Women are not expected to discuss their problems related to sexual health. Knowledge about family planning methods is very poor. There are myths, misconceptions and religious norms that hamper using family planning methods. National Rural Health Mission is now one of the biggest programmes that aim at bringing about positive changes in the attitudes of people towards family planning.

India, which is nearly seventy percent rural, does not have adequate health care infrastructure. The country has a huge web of Primary Health Centres along with sub centers, secondary and tertiary health care facilities. However, accessibility is a big problem. India still has high rate of infant mortality rate as well as maternal mortality rate even in comparison to most of the developing countries. Families not able to get adequate facilities for maternal and child health often face problems in discharging their responsibilities adequately. Giving birth to a girl child brings disgrace to women in most of the traditional societies in India. Infanticide is not uncommon. India’s sex ratio is highly skewed against females. One of the reasons for this is detection of sex of the unborn child and abortion if it happens to be a girl. Foeticide is illegal but is practiced cutting across educated and uneducated, rural and urban people. It is quite challenging for social work professionals to bring about this deep rooted bias against girl child that snatch away from them their ‘Right to Life’. After child-birth, roles and responsibilities of both parents increase manifolds. Various stages of family life cycle, In those cases where fathers shun away from their responsibilities by saying that ‘child care is not a man’s job’, mothers are often overburdened which may affect their physical and mental health adversely. This situation of role conflict and role strain calls for social work intervention.

Parenting Young Children Socialization of children is a major task of parents in this stage. It includes facilitating the child accomplish developmental tasks successfully such as sitting, crawling, standing at infancy, language development, physical development, mastering motor skills, social skills, developing etiquettes and mannerism among children as they grow older. Schooling of children also requires time and money resource of parents. Immunization and taking care of health needs of children is also very crucial. There may be red flag situations requiring attention of social work professionals.

One set of situations is related to family norms such as superiority of male child and biases against meeting the development needs of girl child, inequitable distribution of scarce family resources in favour of males. Another set of situations is with family ecology. Children belonging to backward castes and classes denied opportunity for adequate education facility, problems related to infrastructure, availability of teachers and teaching materials at school, accessibility of schools (girls being denied opportunity for higher studies as the school is not in the same village), poverty and child labour, disability, economic constraints to pay fees or buy books, etc. There is denial of Right to Education among such out of school children.

Parenting Adolescents

Parenting teenagers can be a rough time for the family. Adolescence is the period when physically, mentally and socially a person goes through numerous changes. There are many hormonal changes that take place in the body to prepare a person towards sexual maturity. In Indian context, when talking about sex and sexuality with one’s own children is a taboo, there is often a gap between parents and offspring where both hesitate to share their feelings and emotions with each other. Most adolescents depend upon their peers for sex education who themselves are hardly knowledgeable. Premarital sex is very common, nowadays, both in rural as well as urban India. Adolescents are susceptible to STD and HIV infections. Added to this, they can be easily lured away towards alcohol and drugs. At this stage family values, bonding, affection, trust and approachability to parents for any problem are required for the children to pass through this phase successfully.

Ground reality shows that a sizable proportion of adolescent girls are married away and may have to bear the burden of pregnancy when their body and mind are not prepared for it. Parents’ sensitivity and knowledge is required to allow girl children to study, become self-reliant and get married at an appropriate age. various stages of family life cycle, Social work professionals need to do advocacy against early marriages. Another area of concern is increasing pressure of examination and stress related to academic performance. The expectations from children are too much and fear of not being able to perform even leads to suicidal attempts among the adolescents. There is a need for urgent social work intervention in this area in collaboration with school authorities, families and community.

Contracting Stage :

Retirement and Empty Nest This is the last stage of family life cycle. Many significant events happen at this stage — children settling down in their career, their marriage and setting up their own housing unit, either within the extended household/family or separately (neo-local), retirement from the economically active life and beginning of newer adjustments and newer roles at the family and community level.

In situations, where young children step out of the household to establish their own household unit or for their career development, old parents are left alone in the family. They started their family unit together and in this stage again the two are left alone.

This is called ‘empty nest’. They may have enough time resource, but energy resource and money resource decrease considerably. A lot of health problems like high/low blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, cataract, etc., creep in which influences their daily life activities. Socially also, elderly parents do not have significant roles to perform and feel disengaged. This results in feelings of alienation, worthlessness and neglect. It is termed as ‘empty nest syndrome’ that denotes the anxieties, loneliness and feeling of emptiness, the old couple are left with, when their children leave. In Indian context, in general, elderly parents are not left alone and they stay with families. Old age homes are coming up but are not popular. Even if conflicts are there, elderly want to stay in their family only. Further, separation from spouse, due to death, is a major crisis event. Widowhood, especially among elderly women increases their vulnerability manifolds. With socio-cultural biases and discriminations, widowhood often brings economic and social insecurity along with emotional setback. Roles of social work professionals in this stage include pre-retirement counseling, preparing late middle-aged for old age, preventive interventions to avoid health problems, advice on financial management, dealing with death of spouse, relatives and friends, inter-generational relation building, active ageing, maintaining physical and financial autonomy in old age.