Core principles of family development (Forest, 2015)
Family development is based on the following core principles:
- All people and all families have strengths.
- All families need and deserve support. How much and what kind of support varies throughout life.
- Most successful families are not dependent on long-term public support. They maintain a healthy interdependence with extended family, friends, other people, spiritual organizations, cultural and community groups, schools and agencies, and the natural environment.
- Families come in many forms and from many kinds of backgrounds - these may not be the same as the family worker's. Family workers need to gain an understanding of these differences in order to work and communicate skillfully with families.
- The deficit approach, which requires families to show what is wrong in order to receive services, is counterproductive to helping families move toward self-reliance.
- Changing from the deficit model to the family development approach requires a whole new way of thinking, not simply more new programs. Individual workers cannot make this shift without corresponding policy changes at agency, state, and federal levels.
- Families need coordinated services in which all the agencies they work with use a similar approach. Collaboration at the local, state, and federal levels is crucial to effective family development.
- Families and family development workers are equally important partners in this process, with each contributing important knowledge. Workers learn as much as the families from the process.
- Families must choose their own goals and methods of achieving them. Family development workers’ roles include helping families set reachable goals for their own self-reliance, providing access to services needed to reach these goals, and offering encouragement.
- Services are provided so families can reach their goals, and are not themselves a measure of success. New methods of evaluating agency effectiveness are needed to measure family and community outcomes, not just the number of services provided.
- For families to move out of dependency, helping systems must shift from a "power over" to a "shared power" paradigm. This allows workers to interact with families as equal partners who, with appropriate support and equal responsibility, have the capability to set and achieve their own goals and a healthy self-reliance.