LOSING HOME, LOSING HEALTH

America's Need to Re-Inhabit HOME

This post is not about the poor health of the homeless - although such is certainly real. This is about what has been lost from American homes and how that loss has impacted personal health.

Over the past century, traditional keepers of home - women - have proven themselves capable as providers as well as nurturers. The upsides of women working outside the home are many. Most academic disciplines, business fields, public offices, and advocacy efforts for critical social issues have benefited from the voices and contributions of women working outside the home.

And yet, there have also been downsides. Arguably, what the workplace gained, our home spaces gradually lost. Like the frog in slowly boiling water, home has become saturated with time-saving conveniences, ever-new technologies, and instant access to attention-grabbing news.

The space where children are nurtured, providers are cared for, the future of humanity is created - and homemakers were once valued - seems somehow lost now from our conscious awareness. How many of us today think of home as truly sacred space, as the place that nourishes our bodies and revives our spirits?

In only a few generations, home has undergone tremendous change.

Easiest to see – and very critical for human health – is how the American home so rapidly lost its grip on food.  Many schools now feed children two of their three meals a day, including a daily meal in summer feeding programs.  Fast food and meals eaten out are now commonplace. Skill in everyday home cooking has suffered; full plates of fresh and healthy variety are seldom daily fare, including in school cafeterias. Ultra- processed and fast foods have become cheap and readily available, with many poor families grocery shopping in nearby dollar stores.

Is it too late to save ourselves from the addiction of fast food and the convenience of super-stocked supermarkets?  Is it any wonder that obesity with its attendant problems has become rampant?  Or that diet-related diseases are so prevalent?

Is America experiencing a great learning? One we have we created for ourselves. If we have lost control over the most basic ingredients of good health – food, safe space, and nurturing relationships - if our homes have less time to focus on wellbeing and TLC when children are sick, how do we change the health crisis America is in?  How do we prevent chronic diseases, strengthen ourselves against pandemics, and avoid expensive end-of-life care? Most of which come from not taking care of ourselves and not having home spaces where good care can be given.       

As women moved into the workplace, many tasks once based in the home moved outside as well: children moved into daycare, personal health went to doctors, meals to restaurants and fast-food chains, and discipline control to over-taxed teachers.

The loss of full-time home tenders has been just that – a loss.  And a loss not only within the home but a loss with unexpected and significant consequences beyond home. Not the least has been a groundswell of poorly paid jobs for the lesser educated among us, including women.  How many of today’s career-focused households consider that their daily functioning depends on a small, and largely unacknowledged, army of lesser paid workers in the food industry, in cleaning and caregiving, and in the factories that make the many essentials of our now convenient lives.  Not to mention the grandparents who provide increasingly necessary and free care to their children and grandchildren.  

Whether changes in the home have added to social and economic inequality is a suggestion left on the table for now.  The question here is how the dilution of home has impacted human health.                  

Dividing and buying and sharing of domestic needs presents a dilemma for healing and wellness that becomes not only obvious but deeply concerning when we realize our addiction to processed foods, our loss of cooking skills, and the fact that home care is not considered, let alone emphasized, in the career goals of young people today, including - perhaps especially - females.  Women have been there and done that and we don’t want to do it again.  At least not as the all consuming, barely seen, and poorly valued role that homemaking was and has more so become.

But who will?  Essential domestic chores must get done one way or another.  Children must be nourished and heard and taught and loved and valued if they are to return these things as adults.  Food must be fresh and real - and often personalized - if we are to step away from so much obesity and disease.  Clean environments must be understood and created and maintained. Establishing of routines, coordinating of schedules, understanding medical options and new lifestyle ways - all of these and more require skills that are no longer taught in homes or in classrooms.

As always, change is a constant, and humans have the unique ability to move through time as problem solvers.  As chronic disease overtakes us and allopathic medicine extends life but fails to heal, the question becomes ‘why?’.  If researchers have linked environmental toxins to hormonal, metabolic, and neurological damage, then why not remove them from at least our home environments?  If the body’s natural ability to self-heal can be activated by healing foods and healthy lifestyles, then how can we accomplish this? If drug therapies are managing but not resolving heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, why would we continue them? Why use treatments that so often interfere with normal metabolic function and thwart self-healing?  

By refocusing treatment on the causes of disease, lifestyle medicine offers new therapies that are proving to be successful.  Yet, root-cause treatment plans are multifaceted and need to be personalized for each patient. And they must be daily and on-going.  Such lifestyle-based solutions are usually devised in clinics, but they cannot be carried out there. They must instead engage patients in self-care in their homes and be maintained over time.   

As the impacts of food, environment, and lifestyle are repeatedly verified in research and clinical application, and as successful treatment invariably requires patient self-care and clean environments, home appears squarely in our sights as the inevitable space where healing must happen and where wellness can be maintained.

Healing chronic disease at home with lifestyle solutions means we are experiencing a major social and cultural shift.  Reversing rising rates of chronic disease means coming home to apply what we now know is possible - real healing and reversal of the major conditions that plague us.

Let’s be clear. We are not speaking here of the legions of (poorly) paid caregivers tending today’s booming elder population. We are speaking of full-time, place-based, family-centered, multi-tasked keepers of home. We are speaking of a lost role that must not only be revived but re-imagined if we are to become well again.

As home and self-care take center stage, the questions become many: How will society respond to this need to re-inhabit and re-imagine home?  Who will be the tenders of home in this new age of self-care and healing?  Many roles have become gender-free, will we do likewise with home-tending?  How will this new generation of home-tenders be trained? And perhaps most critically, how will they be valued?

As we ponder these questions, others arise: Can we rebuild community food webs without homes that understand their value and cooks who know food quality? Can patients fully heal without communities that address local environmental threats? How will small rural communities engage with and provide for lifestyle medicine? How will schools provide daily meals that do not undermine what health-seeking homes and cooks are working to accomplish? In short, can we live well locally without homes and home tenders who are committed to wellness?

Next Up: The Power of Tending Home: 29 Things, 36 Holes

Coming Up: Role Equity