The family life cycle is the process of different development stages or changing processes that every family experiences. The family may go through different stages of life where they face stressful life and sometimes periods of joy such as the marriage as well as the arrival of their first child and like illness of any family member or demise. The family learns to accept the changing situation as well as grow and prepare themselves for future change. The family learns to adapt to the different changing situations effectively, especially the two stages of life. Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling (marriage), where an individual learns to develop and build a new relationship.
Main Content about Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling
The family life cycle stages depend on the effects of marriage and divorce and the births of a child and deaths on families, as well as changing the situation in the financial condition of a family-like income and expenses and assets. An individual goes through different stages of life where they not only grow but experience many changes, so this is necessary to understand the emotional as well as intellectual changes at a certain stage. The different family life cycle stages are mentioned here.
· Independence-Career and schooling age
In this stage, a person learns to develop physically and socially as well as emotionally and financially. People see themselves individually in a family as a member and build external peer relationships with others.
· Coupling or marriage
This stage of life is very important as a member of a family is connecting with another member to start a new family process. In this process, both the people share ideas and experiences from their own cultures. It has been believed that Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling (marriage) are the most efficient stages in the family where a person learns to deal with the situation.
· Parental stages
In this stage, a person experiences a drastic change as they are the adult members of a family, now converting to the parental stage where they need to protect their child and develop their social environment.
· Taking care of adult children.
In these stages, the child becomes an adult,and then establishes new relationships as new in-laws and with their grandparents, so their child experiences parental stages.
· Retirement and old years.
In this stage, a person becomes a grandparent of their child, establishes emotional support to the adult children, and experiences a change in financial as well as social status.
When reaching such stages of family life cycles, a person gets the opportunity to learn new skills and strengths as well as to grow. All these stages of the family life cycle are important for the development process, but the first two stages in Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling (marriage) play a vital role in the development.
- Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling
The independence stage and martial stage of the Family life cycle are the most important stages where a family member commits to begin a new life with a new member exchanging love and sharing bonds and learning to deal with the situation independently. Let’s describe Family Life Cycle: Independence and Coupling (marriage) here
The independent stage is the most important stage to learn adjustment and enter into a family separately. When a person enters adulthood, he learns to survive independently and develop unique characters and abilities that describe them individually in the family. Boys and girls have their likes and dislikes and learn to accept responsibilities as well as perform individual tasks and achieve success in financial matters. In this stage, a person learns to maintain satisfying relationships.
The Coupling and Marriage stage is the stage where a person builds new relationships and learns to adapt and share the feelings of love and insecurities, and alienation. The newly married couples learn to behave for the welfare of each other’s needs. The newly married couple finds it difficult to adjust with each other as they have different cultures and communities. They need to establish a mutual understanding for a successful marriage.
· The family life cycle in consumer behaviour
The family life cycle in consumer behaviour emphasises every stage, such as Young single spending a lot of money and not saving it for the future. At the same time, married couples need to spend by sharing expenses with their partner. When a person becomes a parent, he needs to spend on his childcare, a young child needs school expenses, so both partners need to work to improve their financial condition. When the family grows old, financial status improves due to a rise in wage earners, and when they grow old, their financial condition stabilises.
Conclusion
The family life cycle is the process of family development that includes many stages such as young adulthood, marriages, parental stages, and later life. These stages allow you to learn new skills that would help to deal with changes. It is also necessary for the family to maintain mutual understanding in the decision-making while spending money on certain things.