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1、LIFE STAGESSteven MintzJohn and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, Director, American Cultures Program, University of HoustonIN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND change over time in patterns of individual and family development, social historians have made extensive use of three important analytical constructs:
2、 the life stages, the family cycle, and the life course. The life stages such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old ageare developmental phases, each with its own biological, psychological, and social characteristics, through which individuals pass over the course of their lives. Th
3、e family cycle (which social anthropologists call the developmental cycle) refers to the stages through which families go as members age and family size expands and contracts. The life course refers to the passage of individuals through major life cycle transitions, such as leaving home, getting mar
4、ried, and entering and leaving school and the labor force.Lifestages analysis has focused on the changing definition, demarcation, and social experience of the phases of individual development. It has shown that over the course of American history the definition of the life stages has grown more ,co
5、nceptually precise and more completely organized institutionally, and that the transition between stages has become more abrupt and disjunctive.The familycycle approach has concentrated on changes in the basic phases through which families go from the time they are formed to the time they are dissol
6、ved. It has revealed the impact of such important demographic developments as declining fertility rates, increasing life expectancy, prolonged residence of children in their parents home, and the decline in the practice of boarding on the familial experience of individuals.Lifecourse analysis has ex
7、plored changes in the timing and sequencing of key life cycle transitions. It has found that since the eighteenth century the timing of major transitions has grown more rigid and uniform, and has increasingly come to reflect individual preferences rather than family needs. Taken together, the lifest
8、ages, familycycle, and lifecourse approaches have underscored the fact that private life has undergone transformations at least as radical and farreaching as those that have occurred in Americans public institutions.This essay will describe changes in the definition and demarcation of the life stage
9、s over time. It will examine the impact of such historical developments as the rise of the market and urbanization on the demarcation of the life stages and the timing of key lifecycle events and transitions, and the rituals surrounding them. It will also examine the changing significance of age in
10、American culture and the shifting distribution of power among various age groups.THE ANALYSIS OF THE LIFE STAGESThe notion that human development passes through a series of stages is rooted in antiquity. Roman writers identified three to seven distinct ages of man, proceeding from conception to deat
11、h. Medieval thinkers and artists formulated a variety of systems of age groups, dividing human life into three, four, five, six, seven, ten, and twelvepart schemata. Perhaps the bestknown periodization of the human life cycle is found in William Shakespeares play As You Like It, where he describes s
12、even stages of human life, beginning with puking infancy and ending with second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.Today, social scientists use the concept of the life cycle to refer to the division of individual lives into a series of sequential stage
13、s, such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age, and old age. Each stage is defined in terms of three distinct conceptual components: biological, psychological, and social. The contemporary notion of adolescence, for example, consists of a biological componentinvolving pubertal physical chang
14、es, rapid physiological growth, and sexual maturation; a psychological componentinvolving drastic mood swings, inner turmoil, generational conflict, and a quest for identity; and a social componentwhich involves the shifting social experience, institutional treatment, and cultural definition of adol
15、escence.Each conceptual component of a particular life stage is affected by a changing historical and cultural context. This is true even in the case of biology. Recent scholarship has suggested that the age of first menstruation and the age at which young people attain full physical stature has dec
16、lined since 1850. The age of menarche appears to have fallen from approximately fifteen or sixteen in 1850 to between twelve and thirteen in 1990, while the age of puberty for boys seems to have declined from around sixteen to thirteen or fourteen. Similarly, the age at which young men achieve full growth appears to have fallen from about twentyfive in the early nineteenth century to around twenty in the late
