What is Family Life Education?

"Family life education focuses on healthy family functioning within a family systems perspective and provides a primarily preventive approach. The skills and knowledge needed for healthy functioning are widely known: strong communication skills, knowledge of typical human development, good decision-making skills, positive self-esteem, and healthy interpersonal relationships. The goal of family life education is to teach and foster this knowledge and these skills to enable individuals and families to function optimally.

"Family life education professionals consider societal issues including economics, education, work-family issues, parenting, sexuality, gender and more within the context of the family. They believe that societal problems such as substance abuse, domestic violence, unemployment, debt, and child abuse can be more effectively addressed from a perspective that considers the individual and family as part of larger systems. Knowledge about healthy family functioning can be applied to prevent or minimize many of these problems. Family life education provides this information through an educational approach, often in a classroom-type setting or through educational materials." (description from the National Council on Family Relations at http://www.ncfr.org/cfle-certification/what-family-life-education).

In other words: Family life educators teach families skills and knowledge in order to prevent the negative consequences that come from not being properly educated. Some examples of these consequences could range from unnecessary stress placed on the family to severe situations such as domestic violence, neglect, and homicide. While Social Work and Marriage and Family Therapy seeks to put the pieces back together after a crisis in the family, Family Life Education seeks to prevent the crisis from happening altogether by establishing defensive barriers. In the case of our blog, we seek to prevent unnecessary stress and burnout caused by foster parenting in order to make the experience of foster parenting more rewarding for both parents and foster child(ren).