From One Generation to the Next

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

I still remember the day I walked to the plane and didn't wave good-bye to my parents. I'd just graduated from college and was flying from Dayton to Los Angeles for a job. It wasn't that I didn't want to affirm their presence in sending me off. It was just that I was focused too much on the future to think of the past.

While I didn't think in family life cycle terms back then, I was clearly in the beginning of stage one—leaving home. My parents were in stage five—launching children and moving on. So we both had a few emotional bumps and bruises along the way. For example, I later discovered that my mother was bothered by my lack of "courtesy" to wave and I eventually wasn't bothered by well-meaning comments in her letters suggesting I live my life a little differently. She never said I was "wrong," but she sometimes did imply that perhaps I wasn't quite doing things the way she would have.

These transitional passages from one stage of family life to another are built into the fabric of every family, although different cultures will put their particular twist on what happens when. Nevertheless, as we move from one stage to another, we must negotiate key emotional principles and be willing to make second-order changes if we are to proceed developmentally without too much difficulty.

The articles we've selected for this topic are merely representative of a few of the things that families experience as they move from generation to generation. Other articles in the Stages of Life section as well as the Relationships and Raising Children sections greatly expand these ideas.