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Disciplines of Family and Consumer Science
Home-economics or family and life science has quite the history, and developed over time. These courses and classes brought valuable information from the classroom into homes where people learn the value of frugality, longevity, and a healthy mindset to making your personal items last. The best kept secret of being frugal, is reusing or knowing exactly how you spend your family budget. The secret: do not spend when you can re-use. By recycling in your own home, you will lessen the carbon footprint and the trash you throw out every week. So let us take a look at the following:
Cooking
To understand cooking you will learn the best means to find nutritional value of your foods and develop a baseline of nutrition for yourself. Paying for food at a grocery store will enhance your overall health and relative cost in order to maintain your diet. Understanding importance of balanced meals through a rotational basis will allow consistent performance and optimal health. Cooking your food is a way and means to have full awareness of self and family. Many websites have cooking means, methods, and recipes and have successfully grown to give the recipes that taste good and promote the best of health. How do you manage your household food budget? What types of meals do you serve as a baseline for your family? What types of food are you missing with overall health foundation? The basic skills of cooking and home economics revolves around your ability to plan your regular shopping trips for the next set of days to prepare at home.
Child development
Raising a child from birth to adulthood. Relative costs and skills to teach at every skill level. How to guide your child through difficult moments. Overcoming difficulty and teaching resiliency for your children. How an adult can be a gracious host or babysit children. How to reach your teenager and making the change from being a child towards becoming an adult. Knowing your children, also allows the parent to hit specific milestones with their growth. As parents know what works for them, will surely make your responsibilities lessen as they learn quickly over time. Understanding the growth potential and stages, responsibility, and guidance is unique for each child, yet will have a timeframe to hit maturity.
Education and Community Awareness
Education and knowing yourself is a way to identify your shortcomings and working through them. Responsible adults will understand where they are in life, and how want to continue advancing themselves. To better understand yourself, there is a Questionnaire originated by Marcel Proust, The Proust Questionnaire. A lot of these questions relate to your true nature. As you know yourself, work on ways that can better relate to that of your community. In your community, you will find events and activities to involve yourself and your family. Finding ways to socialize with your community and further education help improve those of yourself and others. Otherwise, isolation without others to work with will make life more challenging.
Home Management and Design
Managing the inside and outside of your home pays dividends to its future potential. Regardless if you own a house, apartment, flat, condo, your living space, these living arrangements have a particular way to plan and organize the area. Your living space has different ideas and thoughts for making your home inviting and opening, scheduling opportunities and skills within your family. Managing the physical aspects and schedule of your home is a continuous cycle of making sure your home is functional, secure, safe, and operable. By designing your space, you make it feel comfortable with your use of space, color, pattern, and accoutrements that make your space unique.
Sewing and Textiles
This part of design and clothing is an essential skill for anyone to learn. It is also a trade that is in high demand. More and more people are spending time buying and throwing out clothes, when it is creating much more demand and increasing the costs of clothing we wear. Everyone should learn how to sew, do minor repairs, and showcase their skills with their friends for being environmentally friendly. In some cases, it can save you some money and you have self-efficacy for creating something. If you are a parent, you can create costumes for Halloween and special events. When I was going through this class in school, we learned about the different stitching patterns and making quilts with different patterns.
Budgeting and Economics
This is an interesting issue on the internet. There is no secret that more and more people are confused on stretching their dollar and making things much more affordable. Hint: the more people end up shopping, the more demand for items is created; people do not need “everything”. Creating and running a household budget is important to identify what is a need compared to a want. However, you design this budget can drive decisions that you make with your partner. The previous disciplines have a cost threshold, yet they trade off your time with the skill to make those items last. If you are the crafty type, you will save money.
Health and Hygiene
Maintain your health on a regular basis, and you will learn to see the long-term effects of preparing yourself well in your youth. Also, anyone making a life-change have made transformative habits in their personal lifestyle that enhances their longevity. Making good decisions about your health improves upon your life outlook and caring at the right time.
With these seven disciplines, we understand the focus and value that you can bring within your home. Through these different disciplines, the home you create will improve upon sustainability and functionality. It does not mean you have perfected each area, although a skilled homemaker will have developed each of these areas. In keeping within these areas, the home is able to reduce expense, reduce waste, and maintain the living means. Within your living space, the concepts of proper storage, supply, and home-makings are important to functionality.
The development and use of lasting tools, trades, and use of time will see an abundance created from the saved difference. For example, if your skill and use of your skill will save your family budget $5 a week, you will have saved over $1,300 in a 5-year period. This example does not look like much, but this is why each of these areas are referred to as disciplines. With these disciplines, you can continue to develop them into an exciting topic that you will want to discuss and show others.
How did we go from economics to home economics?
In observing family and consumer science, you will understand the economic factors. Let us break down the fact that any home-trades can survive as a hobby (personally valuable, can be sellable, little earnings), your skills are of value to someone. This function allows for your residence to function as independently as possible without having to continue invaluable goods. This equity to yourself is typically not enough to build very large projects or products without any significant earnings. This forces most, if not all, people to find work that will bring in a significant income. By working, your time is traded in value for a wage.
Likewise in studying microeconomics, a local area will be having labor of different kinds to sustain a community, a town, a county, and etc. Items and goods that are not native to the area must have an import of goods to survive. Adam Smith in “Wealth of Nations” explains this concept perfectly in how goods, trades, and services are interchanged between one community to the next. Along with this interchange, the amount you hold on hand (supply) will increase or decrease on the need (demand). This business relationship exists in order to maintain commerce between multiple bodies that have products or services that are needed.
Within economic terms, a couple or family with children espouse each other to exchange into personal relationships, and also a business relationship. We tell our children this is called, “responsibility,” because they must contribute to someone else for survival. Through the skills, trades, and exchanges of a couple often formulate a business relationship with each other. This means the value of time, money, consumption, and expenditure are integral relationship conversations that are required on a regular basis.
As you consider the thoughts of family and consumer science, or home-economics, what sticks out to you the most with these different disciplines? How does your time effect the cost-improvement through this practice? How have you understood the relation of your home with the outside world? Please leave your comments below, or e-mail us in how your disciplines has improved your home life.
