Core Principles of Family Development
Family development is based on the following core principles
1. All people and all families have strengths.
2. All families need and deserve support. How much and what kind of support varies
throughout life.
3. 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.
4. Diversity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, family form, religion, physical and
mental ability, age, sexual orientation) is an important reality in our society, and is
valuable. Family workers need to understand oppression in order to learn to work
skillfully with families from all cultures.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. For families to move out of dependency, helping systems must shift from a
“power over” to a “shared power” paradigm. Human service workers have power
(which they may not recognize) because they decide who gets valued resources.
Workers can use that power to work with families rather than use power over
them.