Family Life Cycle

Historical Background

The original impetus for studying family change was the unprecedented rates of unemployment during the Great Depression. Research by Charles Loomis revealed that changes in family size and composition were correlated with household income. Families were at greatest risk of poverty when their children were too young to work and when the parents were too old to work after their children had been launched. After World War II, researchers such as Paul Glick, Evelyn Duvall, and Reuben Hill further developed the idea by delineating specific stages that families went through based on family size, births, ages, launching of children, and the retirement of spouses. Early studies found that the length of family stages was related to age at first marriage, duration of child-bearing, and number of children. For example, couples that married late in life would be more likely to have children soon thereafter and consequently would not remain in the childless stage of the family life cycle as long as would couples who married early in life. Similarly, couples who chose to have a large number of children would remain in the childbearing stage of the family life cycle longer than would couples who chose to have fewer children.

Early Conceptual and Empirical Challenges

Although it was initially used by demographers for descriptive purposes, family developmentalists continued to advance the concept. The continuing evolution of FLC was met with excitement because it provided a dynamic view of families to replace the previously static one. On the basis of the epi-genetic principle of developmental change, families were viewed as going through a sequence of stages over time. Each stage built on the immediately preceding stage. Only after families mastered the tasks specific to one stage could they proceed successfully to the next stage and its tasks. A succession from one stage to the next was considered normal development.

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