Many family therapists use the family life cycle as a map for assessing trouble in a family, and for making the appropriate intervention. For example, a common glitch that can occur in single parent families is increased difficulty launching a child, due to worry about how the parent will fare alone. Talking through these emotional issues of separation can increase the likelihood that children will be able to do well in their new independent endeavors (college, or leaving home to work and live on their own), especially when they are assured by the parent that he or she can manage without them at home. Likewise marriages that have been held together "for the sake of the children" may result in the youngest child's continual return home due to failure in the world outside the family. Talking about these situations may help a family move through the launching stage and get "unstuck."

Parents may also find themselves under increased stress when they travel through a part of the family life cycle in which unresolved feelings from childhood are buried. The following exercise will help you to trouble-shoot potential stages that may put you under increased stress. Getting help, professional or otherwise, to talk through these stages in your past will help you adjust to the present family's tasks when it passes through the same stage.

For example, if you lost a parent at the age of three, you will experience feelings related to this loss as you travel through the stage of raising young children. Research carried out by Paul and Paul in the early 1980s, demonstrated that when grief goes untreated, families in counseling felt threatened by the possibility of marital dissolution. Looking at a family's history, this loss can be revealed. The Pauls' research showed that the trajectory towards divorce is halted, and present family issues are resolved when the parent suffering the early loss experiences a full release of his or her previously suppressed emotional pain. Resolving past loss allows families to remain intact at a statistically significant rate.

EXERCISE

Draw an "x" on each stage in the life cycle that represents a period of increased stress in your childhood due to losses (parents' divorce, death of a significant relative, stressful move or parental job change) or in other ways was particularly stressful (abuse in adolescence,unresolved strife and conflict at any given period,a period when physical or mental disability in a family member first appeared).

__________|__________|____________|_______________|_____________|_________|___________
unattached| coupling | pregnancy  | raising young |  raising    |launching| later life
adult                    & birth      children      adolescents   children

If you are doing this exercise with a spouse, interview one another about these stages, prompting the partner if he or she forgets to name something you know about in his or her family history that you feel is significant. Plot one another's significant childhood stressors in the appropriate stage when each initially occurred, below:

SELF:

___________|__________|____________|_______________|_____________|_________|___________
unattached| coupling | pregnancy  | raising young |  raising    |launching| later life
adult                    & birth      children      adolescents   children

SPOUSE:

__________|__________|____________|_______________|_____________|_________|___________
unattached| coupling | pregnancy  | raising young |  raising    |launching| later life
adult                    & birth      children      adolescents   children

Finally, if you are doing this exercise as a couple, you can combine all of the stressors that appear on both lines and plot your family life cycle stage stress composite below:

__________|__________|____________|_______________|_____________|_________|___________
unattached| coupling | pregnancy  | raising young |  raising    |launching| later life
adult                    & birth      children      adolescents   children