The advantages The advantages of family life education are described as follows :

1. Family life education helps in proper understanding of family life cycle:

The impetus for family life education is based on the pervasive nature of the family life cycle. Each new phase of the cycle gives rise to new learning needs. In the past there learning needs were met through informal learning activities such as reading, seeking advice from peers and professionals (doctors, religious leaders and priests) and reflecting on personal experience.

Some of these activities are now being offered as family life education through formal learning programmes. National programmes of planned parenthood, for example, have been established in a number of countries to curtail population growth and to promote improved standards of living.

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The belief that parenting, skills, knowledge and attitudes can be learned through programmes of education as opposed to learning through observation has given rise to a host of such programmes around the world.

2. Family life education provides skills for preventive action and knowledge for decision making particularly among adolescents:

Each new generation of children face health challenges, but those faced by today’s school age group seem particularly daunting. Children are confronted at an early age by situations that require knowledge for decision making and skills for preventive action.

Very often adolescents find themselves under strong peer pressure to engage in high risk behaviour like drug and alcohol abuse and sometimes sexual abuse which can have serious implications on their lives. These issues should be addressed to the young and adolescents through family life education.

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3. Family life education provides an educational role:

The family has always existed as a basic social grouping among human beings, irrespective of the difference in its structure and functioning. There is of course no universal pattern. Families may be nuclear joint or extended, monogamous or polygamous; patriarchal etc. The structure and functions of the family are in transition, and its education role is one which is dynamic in nature.

4. Family life education acts as a crisis manager:

Adolescents are growing up in a world in which they have to make more decisions for themselves than was done by any previous generations. They tend to experiment more with their lives, make choices and take risks, and learn by their own experiences rather than by those of others.

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This can lead to confusion, frustration, despair and risk taking of a kind which may be ultimately self-destructive. So family has important role to pay in order to help people avoid all sorts of crisis.

5. Family life education helps in understanding one’s own role with changing family structure and functions:

The rate of social change in most societies needs to redefine the roles of adult family members. Where tradition once established the norms for family behaviour, parents are now being challenged to re­examine their role and to accommodate the demands of changing family structures and functions.