Ethics All Ethical Approaches Can Be Validly

Ethics All ethical approaches can be validly applied to family life education. Defined as "the educational effort to strengthen individual and family life through a family perspective," family life education views family through ethical lens. However, ethics in family life education extends beyond the ultimate goals of promoting high-level family functioning. The ethics of family life education pertains to the practitioner-client relationship. According to the National Council on Family Relations (2012), practitioners need to be aware of the power and responsibilities they have when forming relationships with clients.

Although all ethical approaches are equally as valid, relational ethics offers special insight into the nature of family life education. Relational ethics "a contemporary approach to ethics that situates ethical action explicitly in relationship," (Austin, 2008). Ethics are primarily situational, but only because ethics evolves out of dialogue and cooperation and not out of rigid ascription to ethical rules. This is not to say that relational ethics has no rules or standards; only that such standards should be created through discourse and interaction.

A family life education approach is best served via relational ethics because the essence of family life education is the strengthening of social ties, because the effectiveness of family life education depends on trust, and because the ultimate goal of family life education is creating harmonious communities. The strengthening of social ties is one of the proximate goals of family life education, which is why relational ethics should define the practice of family life education. Family life education reveals the underlying social norms of family life.

Gender roles, for example, are socially constructed. The family life educator can help strengthen the social ties between members of a family by revealing the importance of gender roles. A relational ethics perspective offers no right or wrong family structures or gender role constructs. Rather, interdependence becomes the normative method of strengthening social ties within the family. Relational ethics is critical for the emergence of trust.

This is true for the relationships between family members, but also between individual family members and the community, between the family as a whole and the community, or between family members and people outside the community. Trust building is a commonly recognized objective, because ethics is "about our interdependency as well as our freedom, our emotions as well as our reason, and our unique situation as well as our human commonalities," (Austin, 2008).

Family life education stresses relational ethics because the ultimate goal of family life education is the creation of harmonious communities. The work of family life education does not stop with an individual family, as it extends into the community. A family is viewed from a systems perspective. This is why relational ethics are central. Systems approaches understand that families are part of a larger social system.

Because the definition of family has changed and will continue to change, it is important to recognize the stress and strain this places on conservative members of the community. The community engages each individual and each family with regards to social norms, which creates strain and stress for families and their constituent members. Engaging all persons in a mutually respectful relationship is the core component of a relational ethics approach.