Transitions in the Family Life

Right now, I keep meeting people in my practice who are going through transitions: couples becoming families, people whose parents are becoming dependent on care, parents whose children are leaving home. Reason enough to dedicate a piece to it.

While researching, I came across the family life cycle model by McGoldrick and Carter from 1989, presented in Johannes Jungbauer’s book “Familienpsychologie Kompakt,” which he calls the best-known model of its kind. What I like is that the authors later expanded their originally heteronormative model.

The McGoldrick and Carter model

Over time, families face similar demands, family developmental tasks. Jungbauer names three sources for these: physical changes such as puberty or the need for care, societal expectations, and the individual wishes of family members.

The model describes six life stages: the single adult, with tasks around self-differentiation and financial independence. The joining of families through marriage, centered on the question of how a couple defines itself as “we.” Families with young children, where the relationship system needs to adjust to make room for a child. Families with teenagers, where the parent-child relationship shifts and attention returns to the middle stage of life. The post-parental phase, renegotiating the relationship as a couple again. And finally, the family in later life, focused on staying functional as a person and a couple amid physical decline, and coming to terms with death and one’s own mortality.

Jungbauer points out that the model mostly takes the parents’ perspective. As systemic thinkers, of course, we’re interested in every family member’s view.

When families don’t fit the traditional picture

What I find especially valuable is the addition of non-normative developmental tasks. Parents after separation have to maintain a supportive co-parenting relationship despite conflict. Blended families need to expand their boundaries and integrate a new partner. Rainbow families often face skepticism in their own surroundings, alongside practical and legal hurdles, and the children have to learn to deal with prejudice too. Families with a child who has a disability often can’t rely on role models from their own family of origin and have to reinvent everyday life from scratch. And families with a parent living with mental illness often experience a fundamental shift in the couple relationship, while children sometimes take on responsibility earlier than usual.

Bumpy phases are part of the plan

What matters to me about this model is how clearly it shows that bumpy phases are, in a sense, built in and normal. Especially when accompanying couples through the transition to parenthood, this brings real relief, it gives permission to feel overwhelmed sometimes, and to not manage things the way you think you’re expected to.