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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.
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