Abstract:

Historically, family education has been based on school pedagogy as a theoretical prototype, in which (developmental) psychology has dominated. Family education has in fact become “parenting” in a micro and narrow sense, which does not correspond to the real image of modern family education. Through the lens of the “how children change in the family” problem domain, we see that family education is forming an interdisciplinary and potentially cross-disciplinary landscape, changing the direction and center of gravity of the discipline of family education and creating an open landscape for family education research. Family education is the “education of things”, the experiential change of children in family life, and the unification of social and psychological mechanisms, of which the social mechanism is the most crucial. A new interdisciplinary cluster of social disciplines is being formed through the study of how children in the family change social mechanisms, with a sociological perspective at its core and important perspectives from economics, family history, and children’s history, etc.; relevant studies of psychological mechanisms form another interdisciplinary area, with developmental psychology at its core, and important perspectives from brain science and physiology. Both constitute a “dual-core” cross-disciplinary situation that explains the body of knowledge on family education and can form a cross-discipline of “modern family education” according to a new model of knowledge production. On this basis, we discuss and demonstrate that sociology exists in the domain of family education through its various branches and general theoretical framework. This effectively supports the ‘dual-core’ interdisciplinarity approach to family education knowledge production.

Key words: family education, interdisciplinary, sociology, knowledge production