ABSTRACT
The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) recognizes the critical role of management in family life education and has included it as one of ten substance areas required for all Certified Family Life Educators (Bredehoft & Cassidy, 1995). Family resource management represents a distinct discipline within family studies that addresses;
an understanding of the decisions individuals and families make about developing and allocating resources including time, money, material assets, energy, friends, neighbors, and space, to meet their goals (e.g., goal setting and decision making; development and allocation of resources; social environment influences; life cycle and family structure influences; consumer issues and decisions). (Bredehoft & Cassidy, 1995)
Unfortunately, management courses are being phased out of many academic programs, and the emphasis on teaching family resource management is disappearing in favor of courses and programs in consumer sciences and financial management. To complicate the situation further, there is only one family resource management text available for teaching (Goldsmith, 2004), and it offers little of the spirit of management that infuses the texts of previous leaders in the field.
