A. Explain the family life-cycle development.
Family life cycle development theory looks at how couples and family members deal with various roles and developmental tasks within the marriage and the family as they move through each stage of the life cycle. In 1948, Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill first proposed a developmental framework for studying families to account for regularities in family life over time. Duvall and Hill’s model included eight stages and each stage is accompanied by the major transition to achieve at that specific stage. They are:
1. The married couple – Commitment to each other
2. Childbearing – Developing parent roles
3. Pre-school aged children – Accepting child’s personality
4. School-aged children – Introducing children to institutions
5. Teenage children – Accepting adolescence (social and sexual role changes)
6. Launching the children – Accepting child’s independent adult role
7. Middle-aged parents – Letting go, facing each other again
8. Ageing family members – Accepting old age
Since 1980, Carter and McGoldrick have continually expanded the concept to include individual, family and socio-cultural perspectives. Their initial model has six stages and each stage comes with an emotional process of transition, and an outline of second-order changes in family status needed to proceed developmentally. The six stages are:
1. Leaving home: emerging single young adults
2. The joining of families through marriage: the new couple
3. Families with young children
4. Families with adolescents
5. Launching children and moving on
6. Families in later life
Later in 2003, Carter and McGoldrick would again revise their model, providing a more multidimensional view of the impact of multiple stresses on a family’s ability to navigate transitions. They believe that the flow of anxiety within a family is related to both “vertical” and “horizontal” stressors. In their model, family life cycles are ...