By: Ricardo Romeo Ramírez (psychologist)

We were taught at school that all living things have a life cycle: be born, grow, reproduce and die. Same thing happens with an amoeba or an elephant, with a flower or a bug. It is a natural process, which allows the development and preserves the species.

An entomologist will be interested in knowing the life cycle of the different species of insects; an marine biologist will be interested in those species that inhabit the ocean, a botanic researcher will be interested in knowing about birth, growth, reproduction and death of the different species of plants.

Thanks to this vital cycle and sequence of life is that every organism has permanence in this world. The state of things in the future depends on the previous stages of life.

From Dr. Lauro Estrada’s point of view family should also be considered as a living system –in fact, in many places it is recognized and called as the “cell of the society”—and we could add that it goes through the same phases an organism does. In this case, such cycle includes the following six stages:

1. Detachment
2. Encounter
3. The decision of having children and when
4. Children adolescence
5. The re-encounter with the couple
6. Elderly

In each of these stages, the family nucleus goes through changes and must adapt to them and just the same as with any other organism, it can be done in a healthy or in a pathological way. So, it is very important to know the characteristics of each of these phases and be totally aware of the possibilities of improvement in the internal conditions of the family system.

Each one of us may belong to two different families: the original family and the family we form with our wife/husband and children. Each of them should go through the six stages above-mentioned. The question would be: how much do we know this vital cycle? Just like the entomologist, the marine biologist or the botanist, we should worry about knowing how a family is born, what it needs to be healthy and strong, how to avoid that it dries before producing fruits, or once it did, how to keep it together with strong roots. There are so many things that influence the vital cycle of a family. For example, why do we choose a certain person as our couple? Why is it so hard sometimes to detach from our original family? What does our children’s adolescence reactivate inside us? When children start forming their own families, how does this affect the fact that parents are left alone little by little, with the “empty nest”?

We could fill up pages with lots of questions, but what I want right now is to create a mental image in our readers of this family as something similar to a living organism that is born, grows, reproduces, and, dies?


Bibliography

“El ciclo vital de la familia”; Lauro Estrada Inda; Edit. “Posada, 3a. ed”., México, 1989.

“La persona: Su desarrollo a través del ciclo vital”; Theodore Lidz; “Edit. Herder, 3a. ed”., Barcelona, España, 1985.

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