English information
Family Education

Family Education

Due to various changes in society, family life has become more complex. At the same time, additions to the list of educational tasks for parents have meant that the expectations on the performance have grown immensely – and all this began long before the results of the PISA surveys were even published! For a long time now measures have been in place with the aim of helping parents cope with a more varied – and partly more demanding – life style. Basically this objective has been dealt with in two areas:

• the composition and structure of the offers to meet the criteria of easy access (i.e., low-threshold offers), to make them accessible to families from all walks of life, according to their respective demands.
• network activities for cross-linking the offers (including the dissemination as well as the guarantee of accessibility to these offers).

Family education issues have been on the research agenda of the ifb for a long time. In the past, the ifb has carried out several studies on family education. Among these studies, there were: the evaluation of mother-child groups, a survey on so-called “parental letters”, focusing on how these letters were perceived by both parents and youth authorities, and a survey among Bavarian parents that investigated their demand for counseling in raising their children as well as their strategies for retrieving information relevant to their daily routines of child-raising. Additionally, two manuals for the implementation of low-threshold measures in family education were being developed: “Co-operation and networking” and the “Manual on low-threshold family education”.

In addition to some small-scale projects on family education, in recent years we have been conducting a study to establish an overall framework of family education measures in Bavaria. Since societies have to deal with changes in the demographic structures and family patterns, increasing spatial and occupational mobility as well as extensive changes in the life course, families may be in need of support by family education measures at different points in time during the various stages of family formation and development. These demands are legally met by the assurance of support measures provision in accordance with article 16 of the federal Child and Youth Service Act (KJHG). Against this background, a multitude of projects and models for family education have been developed and tested so far. On one hand, the growth and the diversity of offers is a good sign for the growing importance of this educational field. On the other hand, however, this success is accompanied by a lack of clarity and low degrees of efficiency with regard to the total output of resource usage. Also, deficits exist in the connectivity among and beyond these programs.

In short, an overarching framework plan was missing, i.e., a plan that structures the contents, establishes connections between the individual models and thus serves as an integrating framework. Such a framework must be construed from modules that can be interconnected in a flexible way.

While a multitude of initiatives and activities can be noticed in practice, the still persistent lack of theoretical foundation in research on family education has been considered to be its largest shortcoming. Up to now, neither a uniform definition of family education nor adequate standards for quality requirements existed. Thus, it has been the objective of this project to close these gaps. For doing so, we have been engaged in the development of an overall concept for family education since the end of the year 2006. It has been a main task of this project to develop a definition of family education that, in turn, serves as a foundation for elaborating quality criteria. The exploration and documentation of the pool of model projects and concepts of family education that already exist constitute another building block of this project.

Additionally, the rather small number of scientific analyses or evaluations of individual services have been investigated. Also, we have conducted our own empirical surveys on the actual inventory of services in family education supplied in Bavaria. With in the project’s framework, we also conducted two surveys on how the supply range as well as the overall situation of family education is assessed on the local and regional levels. Once more, the online survey confirmed that a multitude of supplying agencies and offered services already exist. By the same token, the findings from an analysis of selected Bavarian regions did underscore the necessity for establishing concepts and structures that help optimizing the activities in family education on the spot.

The results of our detailed analyses have been made available to the public via two publications: first, a guideline for practice in family education within the framework of the youth welfare system in Bavaria published as ifb-Materialien 9-2009, and, second, a comprehensive compendium of the Overall Concept of Family Education within the framework of the youth welfare system in Bavaria published as ifb-Materialien 7-2010. As next step, we will conduct a demonstration project on Family Support Units within the framework of the youth welfare system as part of the implementation of the Overall Concept of Family Education in Bavaria.