Families, to a great extent, determine who a person is and what an individual becomes. Various authorities have supported the notion that the family is critical to the development of the human being. The family is an enduring institution which serves as the primary source of fulfillment by providing the basic human needs of love, security, and acceptance. Families nurture and educate the young. Family may be defined as a unit of intimate, transacting, and interdependent persons who share values and goals, responsibility for decisions and resources, and have commitment to one another over time.
Families affect and are affected by the global society in which they live.
The family fosters physical, social, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual conditions of the home and family in order to nurture optimum development of each family member. Family and Consumer Sciences education helps students be critically reflective of social forces influencing families. In addition, students are prepared to be proactive in economic, social, political, and technological change. Perennial problems of nurturing human development, feeding, clothing, housing people, and managing finite resources are faced by each generation across cultures and over time. Family and Consumer Sciences enables individuals to solve such problems in satisfactory ways.