Family Life Education

  Family Life Education (FLE) is the effort made by American professional organizations, universities, and individuals to strengthen families through social science education.

 One of the first professional organizations in the U.S. for Family Life Educators, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), explains Family Life Education this way: "Family Life Education is the educational effort to strengthen individual and family life through a family perspective. The objective of Family Life Education is to enrich and improve the quality of individual and family life." Parenting classes, pre-marriage education, marriage enrichment programs, and family financial planning courses are a few examples of this human development profession. These formal programs are a relatively recent phenomenon. However, Family Life Education has existed informally throughout history — with marriage and child-rearing counsel passed from generation to generation as well as by written information in ancient writings, mythology and religious scripture.

In a seminal work in the field, by Margaret Arcus, Jay Schvaneveldt and J. Joel Moss, the Handbook of Family Life Education offers several definitions by scholars as the field has evolved over time, dating back to 1962. Unlike Family Therapy, Family Life Education works on a prevention model — teaching families to enrich family life and to prevent problems before they occur. Family Therapy intervenes primarily after problems set-in. Research from the Rand Corporation (from Rand research report Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise) and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (in its report Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return) shows that family problems are less damaging for people — and less expensive for society — when they can be tackled by prevention. Family Life Education recognizes that all families can benefit from education and enrichment programs — not only those experiencing difficulties.

 A form of Family Life Education entered public policy in the 1800s in the U.S. Hatch Act of 1887, forming the underpinnings for the national network of Land Grant universities, agricultural experiment stations, and the Cooperative Extension Service out of the US Department of Agriculture. The Hatch Act specifies, in part, that the federal resources for research and education should focus on "agriculture in its broadest aspects" to include the "development and improvement of the rural home." This early form of Family Life Education centered around the field of Home economics and training of practical home-based skills in areas such as food preparation and sewing. Family Life Education moved into widespread public awareness in the early 20th century by offering gardening, home canning and nutrition information to homemakers in programs such as the "Victory Gardens."

In the late 1980s, Dr. Michael A. O'Donnell—a former Assistant Professor of Family Studies and Dean of Professional Studies with Faulkner University and Certified Family Life Educator—and Dr. Nick Stinnett (professor with the University of Alabama) co-founded The International Family Life Institute, Inc., Montgomery, AL, a for-profit enterprise offering assistance in curriculum development, prevention-through-education seminars, and research and writing projects in the area of family and consumer science and practice. The International Family Life Institute helped pioneer the first B.S. degree completion program in Family Life Education on the campus of Spring Arbor University, Mich.
In 1996 the National Council on Family Relations began reviewing and approving family degree programs for inclusion of coursework that could lead to Provisional Certification as a Certified Family Life Educator(CFLE). As of May, 2011 there were 125 NCFR CFLE-approved academic programs.