The Family Life Cycle: Some Suggestions for Recycling

The lifetime family, the family of ego, is distinguished from the lineage family which is the family lasting through time over generations. Use of the term lifetime family and lineage family cycle is suggested. The family is used to describe the participation of a person in the family during her lifetime. The family within the lifetime context consists of four subcareers: the sex experience career, the marital career, the parent-child career, and the adult-parent career. A person may occupy none, several, or all of these positions at one time but the totality of the person's occupancy of the social positions in these four careers becomes the person's family at any one time. By definition, the term career implies a developmental emphasis. Using the four subcareers as a basis for analysis, any individual can be categorized as to the positions she is occupying. Categories may be found to be developmental stages and many of the family life careers have not yet been fully delineated. The short-term longitudinal study was discussed as a research strategy especially applicable at points of subcareer intersections which may be considered the crisis points in family functioning. Groups at the point of subcareer intersection may be thought of as participating in a natural intervention while similar groups not experiencing the intersection may serve as natural controls.