ABSTRACT
The view that individuals and families move through a series of changes from birth to death is by no means a new one. Shakespeare, for example, wrote of the 'seven ages of man', and described how males began as babies and then subsequently became schoolboys, lovers, soldiers and justices, before retiring and then entering a second childhood. The idea of a life-cycle had even entered the social science literature by the early years of this century, when Rowntree (1902), writing on urban poverty, commented that 'the life of a labourer is marked by five alternating periods of want and comparative plenty'. While Rowntree and others, such as Sorokin, Zimmerman and Galpin (1930), were not suggesting that such patterns were inevitable for all, they established a perspective that relied upon cross-sectional analysis and the belief that subsequent cohorts would experience the same cycles and stages. They also made a direct link between stages in the family life-cycle and consumption levels, on the assumption that the former drove the latter.
