Comments and Reflections on Family Coaching: An Emerging Family Science Field

What is "family coaching," and what is its relationship to other family-serving professions? For the purposes of this journal, it is most appropriate to focus on how family coaching relates to family life education.Family life education (FLE) is a fairly young profession that is still exploring its identity. This is consistent with the fact that its academic home - family science - also is struggling with its identity (see Hamon & Smith, 2014; Hans, 2014). As part of the process of establishing FLE's identity, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR, n.d.-a, n.d.-b) has established core content areas and a certification program and has worked to have FLE declared a unique job classification with the U.S. Department of Labor. The identity of FLE in relation to other family-serving roles was addressed first by Doherty (1995) and most recently by Myers-Walls, Ballard, Darling, and Myers-Bowman (2011). These efforts ask the question: What is FLE and how is it related to other family-related roles? The article in this issue by Allen and Huff asks the same questions regarding family coaching (FC).Categorization is an important process in human thought. It starts early in children's cognitive development. Children first learn "this is red, and this is not red." They learn about similarities and differences, what things belong together, big and little, human and animal, fruit and vegetable-and then they get to the tomato. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? Some categorizations are easier than others. Allen and Huff's article in this issue reminds me of these struggles with categorization. They provide a provocative and challenging reflection on what FC is and what it is not when compared to FLE and other family-serving professions. Using the domains of family practice (DFP; Myers-Walls et al., 2011) as a jumping-off point, they suggest that the practitioners of FC are forging a new domain of family practice that is different from FLE, Family Therapy (FT), and Family Case Management (FCM). Not only does this lead me to think of the challenges of categorization; I am also reminded of a quote by Robert Frost (n.d.): "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense." I find myself asking, does FC require a new domain category in the DFP model, and what are the implications of doing so? Should we build walls around it?To use a categorization framework, one must understand the items being categorized along with the framework itself and its assumptions. I looked for a clear description and definition of family coaching in this article, and I also looked for an informed comparison with FLE, FT, and FCM. I gleaned the following defining and descriptive characteristics of family coaching from various places in the document: (a) Coaches guide clients, offer support, and cultivate bio-psycho-social growth opportunities; (b) Coaches set goals with clients and partner with them to work toward the goals and aspirations the clients choose for themselves; (c) Coaching uses a strengths-based approach and helps clients reach their potential and optimal functioning, helping successful people to become more successful and actualized; (d) Coaches try to increase clients' competence, commitment, and confidence in relation to achieving their goals and try to help them gain insight, knowledge, and skills to make meaningful changes in their lives; (e) Coaches establish a process-driven, equal, warm, empathetic relationship/partnership with individuals or family systems and engage families as partners in the change process; (f) Coaches use techniques such as powerful questioning, goal-driven work assignments, assessments, and accountability; and (g) Coaching services are comprehensive.Although these characteristics are helpful to provide a picture of family coaching, a number of questions remain for me. They follow in no particular order. First, what does it mean to partner with clients? …