Biological events and changes of human life are given social meanings through both private reflection and public actions in American culture. From rituals welcoming the birth of a child through the fears surrounding death, these transitions are celebrated, acknowledged as points of crisis and stress, and incorporated into family, work and community. In so far as there is a typical or “model” American life cycle, these transitions tend to reflect the order of Judaeo-Christian traditions, codified and expanded by the state and glossed by consumerism and marketing. Questions arise, however, when Americans differ in their recognition and response to life cycles or are unable to recognize them because of economic insecurity Moreover, rituals and meanings sometimes seem to fail to respond to changing conditions, like the increasing complexities of the transition to adulthood or the meanings of an extended period of mature adulthood, from the fifties into the eighties.

The birth of a child has social, psychological and religious significance for the family and the community into which the child is born. Rituals and medicine converge in the pregnancy and birth process, where technology has radically changed issues of infertility and control of births since the Second World War. Americans belonging to different religious and ethnic groups mark this in different ways: through ancestral or generational names, religious consecration, community celebrations and exchanges of gifts. High teenage and single-birth rates challenge these social celebrations, although the new child may provide important meanings for the mother, father and network. Public recognition of adoptions also has been adapted to these formats.

Birthdays, thereafter, remain important individual holidays, although they change over time. While children expect gifts, parties (and costly entertainment in suburban, middleclass homes), adults may play down these events. Special concern is attached to those that mark thresholds of a new decade—thirty forty fifty etc. Hence, sitcoms joke about women who celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday repeatedly while banter and pranks may alleviate the watershed of reaching the big “five-O.” Coming of age demarcates a second major stage, although there are many variations on how and when this is marked. Adolescence constitutes an extended component of the American life cycle where changes are social as well as biological. If adolescence is a time of multiple recognitions of change, adulthood proves much vaguer in its passages.

American advertising and marketing strategies, for example, define distinct demographic categories of eighteen to twenty-four, twenty-five to thirty-four and thirty-four to fifty; in popular speech, “twenty-somethings” or young adults or “middle-age” also imply differences without any clear-cut transition.

Adulthood, in fact, implies a stabilization of social relationships, where the dominant culture model remains a family. Despite advertisers’ insistence on the importance of attracting people of the opposite sex, dating and courtship in America do not follow any single pattern; they are segmented by region, culture, ethnicity class, gender and religion as well as individual dynamics. Nor do they produce any single outcome. Nonetheless, roughly 70 percent of the population chooses to live in some form of a family whose definitions continue to change on the basis of divorce and remarriage, as well as recognition of many kinds of commitment.

Weddings place civil and, in many cases, religious approval on the union of two persons. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the average age of the bride and groom at their first marriage has risen to the middle twenties. Weddings are notable occasions to display status and wealth. Yet, at this time, approximately 22 percent of the US population has never married.

Family in turn, has been associated with an independent home, especially since suburban expansion opened new opportunities for the separation of nuclear families from parents and community Many families also choose to have children, who may assure the continuity of family names, traditions and more. The sitcom model of a detached home, two photogenic kids, a dog and a station wagon (or SUV in the 1990s) masks many variations in real life. Above all, families have decreased in size—in 1994 the average family consisted of 3.19 members—and nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.

Family stages are also shaped by work, whether postponed, precluded or adapted to the increasing demands of families in which all parents work outside the home. Work itself provides a life cycle network for many adults, whether in baby showers or office romances. Work also produces adult crises, especially amidst the economic divisions and changes of the postwar period, in which dramatic expansions have been met with recessions and lay-offs as well as exclusions.

American media have not treated the aging process kindly or with dignity although most of the country’s discretionary income rests with individuals fifty-five and over, who, in the early twenty-first century may have decades of life ahead of them. As baby boomers have reached “middle age,” they have found themselves caught between the youth culture they affirmed and negative images of old age. Some cultural historians have identified late middle age, usually in the forties and fifties, as a second adolescence, a time of significant transition, loss of one’s identity and re-establishment of self as one considers the inevitability of aging and one’s own death. Since this may reflect diverse intersections of marriage, work and family (shaped by race, gender and class), such transitions are not clearly demarcated socially Instead of celebrating, in fact, many Americans talk about “midlife” crises, which may draw upon social and cultural features (especially “youthful” actions and changed appearance) as well as biology (menopause).

Advertising and marketing divide mature adulthood into two stages—fifty to sixty-four and sixty-five and over—reflecting traditions of the workplace as much as biological or social changes. Social Security has affirmed retirement at sixtyfive as a widespread milestone. Aging changes the family and household (the “empty nest” as children depart for college and independent life; disposal of a home and relocation). Other critical issues in these years may include loss of a spouse, adjustments to fixed and reduced incomes, and healthcare issues. Family roles may be celebrated as rites of passage: the new role of grandparent may provide opportunities for nurturing, while newspapers and community and religious groups will join in the celebration of anniversaries, especially silver (twenty-five years) and golden (fifty years). Yet loneliness and burdens also arise. Caring for a spouse during this time may give purpose and direction, for example, but, despite medical assistance, it may exhaust the family’s life savings. With individuals living longer, economic, health, educational, religious, media and marketing strategies continue to seek and map out the demographic trends that now extend into categories of the “old old” (those beyond their eighties), a rapidly expanding group.

Choosing how to manage this cycle of life, whether passively or aggressively often determines the approach to the final stage, dying and death. The American way of dying is a multibillion-dollar industry building on widespread beliefs in a life beyond human death. Nevertheless, it is the ultimate passage, irrevocably disrupting family and community whether it comes at the end of a long and rich life or severs childhood, youth or young adulthood (taken as unnatural by most contemporary Americans, raised without local war or epidemics). Grief and mourning may be acknowledged through funeral rituals; the family and bereaved are encouraged to rely on the support of their friends, but to get on with life, or the family may divide over the will and disposition of the estate. A wide variety of public and private memorials—from commemorative monuments and cemeteries to more personal expressions and souvenirs—negotiate the finality of this passage.

In most of these experiences and interpretations, Americans scarcely differ from other global societies who endeavor to make sense of regular and intrusive changes in the lives of the men and women who compose them. Nonetheless, the diversity of peoples, expressions and interpretations evoked by these passages and the divergences between experience and established recognition underscore the complexity and changes of American culture.

Growth, transitions and rituals in American life have been investigated by social scientists, pondered by humanists and described in countless works of fiction and mass media.