The initiative of Family Life Education or FLE was taken a number of Professional American organizations along with several universities in order to provide the social science education, in order to strengthen the families. In the words of National Council on Family Relations or NCFR, an American organization for Family Life Education, 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." Family life education includes the programs and courses that help to make a day to day life of an individual or a family better in all possible aspects of their daily life; it includes programs like family financial planning courses, pre-marriage and after marriage education and Parenting classes etc. Family Life Education differs a lot from a formal Family Therapy. The main cause of FLE is to prevent the Family difficulties before they happen rather than waiting for them to happen and then solve them. As far as the Family Therapy is concerned it mainly deals and helps the family with the problems that have already occurred. Therefore, FLE provides the families with education and enrichment programs, by which the rate of family problems in future can be prevented.
National Council on Family Relations was founded in 1938, solely for the purpose of Family research and education and that is the reason why NCFR is by far the oldest non-profiting professional organization, established for the purpose of family education and family research and to provide home to Family Educators and Researchers. The first ever Certified Family Life Educator or CFLE was founded in 1985 by NCFR and according to 2007's reading there were around 1300 CFLE's operating in US and Canada.
The concept of Family Life Education was laid in public policy during 1880's as mentioned in the US Hatch Act of 1887, that "the federal resources for research and education should focus on agriculture in its broadest aspects". The concept of Family Education became more vivid as it also included the stress on development and improvement of rural houses. In that era this was done by putting the focus on Home Economics and skills that were required for making food or sewing cloths, but later in 20th century the concept spread across the country, programs like "Victory Gardens" were offered in which they offered the education and skills regarding home canning, Gardening and nutritional info for the homemakers.
Later in 1912 the evolution of Family Education took another step up, as President William Howard grounded an agency for children's welfare with the name of "Children's Bureau". The primary objective of the agency was to report for the mortality, birth rates among infants, juvenile courts and orphanages along with other social welfare for other known issues. The concept of Family Education was also found in the agency, as the agency also provide with the booklets to the parents regarding child care. Then later in 20th century the subject home economics also included education regarding child development, parenting, relationship-enrichment and communication skills. Soon Universities and Colleges offering the degree programs in the subject area of Home Economics renamed the degree with "Human Ecology," "Family Studies," "Family Life Education," and "Family Science" etc.
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