Home as Center

Posted by Cyn

Many peo­ple don’t seem to have a home any more. I’m not talk­ing about the dis­pos­sessed peo­ple liv­ing on the streets or in home­less shel­ters, but the aver­age, middle-​​class cit­i­zen of the United States. Many of them have nicely fur­nished houses or apart­ments or other places where they sleep or keep their stuff, but it isn’t really home.

This sense of being at home is impor­tant to everyone’s well-​​being. If you do not get enough of it, your hap­pi­ness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease. — Cheryl Mendel­son in Home Com­forts

What makes a place home? I’m still work­ing on my own def­i­n­i­tion, but to me home is that place where you’re most at peace, where you’re refreshed, where you feel safe and loved and com­forted. It’s the place where you want to spend time, whether that’s wher­ever your loved ones are or the place where you con­trol the envi­ron­ment and can do as you please. It’s the phys­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what­ever is most cen­tral to your life.

I see peo­ple who don’t want to leave work because there’s noth­ing in their expen­sive, empty con­dos to make them want to be there. I’ve known peo­ple who hate being with their kids for any extended period. We’ve enter­tained chil­dren in our house who just flat don’t want to go back to where they live. They cer­tainly aren’t being abused or neglected, nor are they being spoiled in our home. I hon­estly think that these peo­ple don’t truly have a home, a place that’s their favorite place in the world.

Some of the most mean­ing­ful com­pli­ments I’ve ever received have been from those who have said some­thing like, “Your house feels like a home. I always feel good/​welcome/​comfortable here.” One friend said she loves to be here because there’s always some­thing going on. All five of us might not be doing the same thing, but we inter­act with each other con­stantly and lov­ingly, and she said that’s the kind of home she wants when she has a family.

We live in a soci­ety where most peo­ple entrust their chil­dren to strangers every day. They wouldn’t even con­sider loan­ing their cars or credit cards to the same peo­ple, but they blithely drop their chil­dren off at day­care cen­ters or put them on school buses with lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion — because that’s nor­mal. It’s what every­one does, right?

Wrong. I’m one of a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple who have looked at the changes in our soci­ety that have coin­cided with a move­ment away from home in gen­eral and real­ized that some­thing is seri­ously wrong.

Through­out most of our his­tory, adults and chil­dren have spent most of their hours at home or in fam­ily busi­nesses of some sort and with their nuclear or extended fam­i­lies. Since the begin­ning of the indus­trial age, more and more of us have shifted to being in fac­to­ries or offices for most of our wak­ing hours while our pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors or child­care providers have raised our children.

Dur­ing that time we’ve also seen increased inci­dence of vio­lent crime, espe­cially among the young. We’ve seen more sub­stance abuse. We actu­ally have a less lit­er­ate pop­u­la­tion in the United States than we had two hun­dred years ago. There are few intact nuclear fam­i­lies and many peo­ple don’t main­tain any sig­nif­i­cant con­tact with their extended families.

Many peo­ple feel iso­lated, depressed, angry, joy­less. They can’t even fig­ure out why they feel that way, because they know they are liv­ing in a very pros­per­ous time. They are sur­rounded by the best of every­thing, and it seems drab, somehow.

I truly believe that what peo­ple are feel­ing is the absence of home. I believe that our soci­ety is see­ing the ill effects of treat­ing chil­dren as after­thoughts rather than pre­cious gifts and shuf­fling them off to insti­tu­tions for no crime other than not fit­ting in with our nor­mal worka­day lives. How can chil­dren avoid know­ing that they’re a prob­lem, an incon­ve­nience, when any ill­ness means their par­ents are either miss­ing work and hav­ing finan­cial or other prob­lems because of it, or fran­ti­cally try­ing to arrange alter­nate child care because they can’t miss work and the child can’t go to school or day­care with a fever? Why should chil­dren believe us when we tell them they’re impor­tant to us if they spend most of their hours with other peo­ple? When they know that the day­care peo­ple care because they’re paid to care, and the school per­son­nel care because they’re paid to care or because there are laws say­ing they have to do so?

Before you decide I’m one of those peo­ple insist­ing that if women had just stayed at home rather than going to work every­thing would be bet­ter, I’m not. His­tor­i­cally, most women through­out the his­tory of civ­i­liza­tion who have worked in some way to con­tribute to the eco­nomic suc­cess of their fam­i­lies every bit as the men have. Chil­dren con­tributed as well!

What has changed is that most peo­ple, male and female, now do some sort of work that is com­pletely sep­a­rate from their homes and fam­i­lies. While chil­dren were usu­ally present while their par­ents farmed or ran fam­ily busi­nesses or raised live­stock, there is no place for chil­dren of a retail clerk on the floor of the depart­ment where he works, or for the off­spring of a com­puter pro­gram­mer in the cubi­cle farm where she spends most of her hours. Most peo­ple (in the United States, any­way) no longer live near their extended fam­i­lies. If they do some sort of work that can­not include their chil­dren, they prob­a­bly don’t have sib­lings or grand­par­ents who can take care of the chil­dren for them. Even when we do live near our extended fam­i­lies, most of those sib­lings and grand­par­ents are also work­ing. The result? Their chil­dren are displaced.

Every morn­ing, most Amer­i­can chil­dren are taken to day­care cen­ters or sent off to schools. Their par­ents rush off to work, and pick the kids up on the way home. Other chil­dren come home to an empty house and wait for their par­ents to get home. By the time every­one is home, there’s lit­tle time or energy left for much inter­ac­tion. Most peo­ple insist that nobody has time for reg­u­lar sit-​​down fam­ily din­ners any more. Week­ends are often full of work brought home and soc­cer games or other sched­uled activ­i­ties. Home just isn’t all that cen­tral to most peo­ple in any real sense any more. Work and school are the cen­ter of most people’s lives, and most schools are designed to pre­pare chil­dren for being good lit­tle employees.

I sin­cerely believe that the deval­u­a­tion of home and fam­ily leads, very nat­u­rally, to the dis­in­te­gra­tion of being in com­mu­nity in any real sense. That dis­in­te­gra­tion is rot­ting our soci­ety from the core. I don’t hon­estly think any of the high dol­lar “gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives” will do a thing to reduce crime or com­bat sub­stance abuse. I do think that a grass­roots move­ment back to the home as the cen­ter of our lives will nat­u­rally improve those prob­lems and make many more pos­i­tive changes in our soci­ety. Again, I’m not talk­ing about women leav­ing the work­force. I do not believe it’s truly healthy for chil­dren to be around either men or women exclu­sively, but that they should be raised equally by peo­ple of both gen­ders. What I am talk­ing about is a move­ment away from work­ing for other peo­ple and going to work every day and back to doing mean­ing­ful work that is an inte­gral part of whole, healthy lives. I’m talk­ing about con­cen­trat­ing on hav­ing bet­ter lives instead of more mate­r­ial things, and about liv­ing in com­mu­nity rather than networking.

I’m not a soci­ol­o­gist or a psy­chol­o­gist or any other per­son with a degree or spe­cial study. I’ve just observed cer­tain truths around me and com­pared the changes in our soci­ety to the his­tory I’ve stud­ied. I can’t help but notice that A hap­pened, then B hap­pened, and that there’s cor­re­la­tion and (I believe) cau­sa­tion. I’m cer­tainly not the only per­son say­ing these things and I cer­tainly wasn’t the first. I’m see­ing arti­cles in every­thing from main­stream news­pa­pers to new age mag­a­zines about the return of the home. I could pull all man­ner of sta­tis­tics out of var­i­ous sources and quote them to sup­port my opin­ions, but I’m not going to do that because I don’t make any claims beyond the fact that I sin­cerely believe that destroy­ing the home as the cen­ter of our lives is destroy­ing us. I’m not even going to pro­vide a bunch of links to the sites of peo­ple who agree with me or what­ever. I’m just putting my thoughts out here.

Much of my per­sonal phi­los­o­phy is com­pletely incom­pat­i­ble with that of peo­ple like Phyl­lis Schafley and James Dob­son. They are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the peo­ple who most often come to mind when any­one starts talk­ing about rebuild­ing our homes and fam­i­lies. I don’t think “tra­di­tional fam­ily val­ues” are nec­es­sar­ily good ones, nor are they actu­ally tra­di­tional. I define fam­ily in a much broader way than most of those peo­ple would accept. I’m not inter­ested in try­ing to force my def­i­n­i­tions on any­one else, but in encour­ag­ing every mem­ber of our soci­ety to devote him or her­self to fam­ily in what­ever form is right for him or her­self. That may be a nuclear fam­ily, a blended fam­ily, a fam­ily of unre­lated adults who have cho­sen to come together, or any of an infi­nite num­ber of com­bi­na­tions. A cou­ple made up of two men or two women can, as far as I’m con­cerned, every bit as good at par­ent­ing as a cou­ple made up of a man or a woman. I don’t think every fam­ily should nec­es­sar­ily have only two adults in it. I don’t believe that some­one with two X chro­mo­somes is auto­mat­i­cally bet­ter suited to car­ing for chil­dren than a per­son with one X and one Y chromosome.

I know that most of the changes the fem­i­nist move­ment has brought to our soci­ety have been pos­i­tive ones. Erod­ing sex-​​based stereo­types is a good thing. It’s ridicu­lous to think that more than half the humans on this planet are only suited to being moth­ers, wives, teach­ers or nurses. It’s just as silly to think that men some­how aren’t as suited to jobs tra­di­tion­ally rel­e­gated to women. We still aren’t any­where near true equal­ity, but we’re closer than we were in 1950.

We’ve thrown the baby out with the bath­wa­ter in that the very notion of being a home­maker and car­ing for chil­dren has been deval­ued. Per­haps they were deval­ued before, or they wouldn’t have been con­sid­ered “women’s work” in the first place. In any case, they cer­tainly aren’t accord­ing the respect they deserve.

 

Last updated Jan­u­ary 26, 2001

Permalink | June 26th, 2012

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