In earlier posts we covered the importance of home as the space where the everyday work of healing takes place. (here, here, here) This, we suggest, puts home and the tending of home on center stage as key players in America’s health and healthcare crises.
Many talented humans are using their passion and skills to support a healthier world: scientists in labs, policymakers in boardrooms, teachers in classrooms, doctors in hospitals, even activists at protests, yet few of us would think to put home tenders and caregivers on this list. The importance of home is easy to affirm, but we seem to lack an understanding of just how this translates into better health, and even less about what it takes to create and maintain a healing home.
The how of healing was addressed in earlier posts on lifestyle medicine (here), real food as good medicine (here), and building community food webs (here and here).
Now we point to the who - the humans who do the daily, hands-on work of regenerative caregiving.
Take just one of many home-based tasks that require a significant daily focus - cooking. When diet is being used to help prevent or reverse disease, especially in the ubiquitous presence of highly processed and fast foods, the procuring, preparing, and managing of a household diet requires skill, dedication, flexibility, and persistence.
Those who commit to understanding and managing the healing process - of which diet is only a part - are in limited supply in today’s world. Those currently doing this work have mostly come in through the door of necessity - because of an autistic child or a spouse with cancer, MS, dementia or another serious condition for which allopathic medicine offers only drugs and/or little hope.
These dedicated domestics are hugely needed, little recognized, and greatly undervalued. Yet, how do we truly heal chronic disease without them?
A little history with a broad brush. Traditionally, women were the caregivers and maintainers of home. When this biologically-determined construct began falling out of social favor about a century ago, early activists and eventually society moved to secure voting rights, equal rights, and empowerment through personal choice. The ‘drudgery’ of housework, and its lesser valuation by society, likely accounted for how dissatisfied women were feeling and, hence, their desire for liberation.
With several generations of women now in the workplace, many American homes stand empty during the workday. Family life happens in evening hours and on weekends; cleaning and cooking are shared and/or purchased chores; sickness is a medical event that can stress parental worktime and preventing illness is about getting clinic visits and medical tests on time. Most of us lack any concept of what ‘healing at home’ requires or that it is even possible.
A century ago, the wise words of Hippocrates, “let food be thy medicine”, had already been lost. Science and technology were providing a more convenient world with ‘better living through chemistry’, a higher standard of living, and drugs and vaccines for disease. Few Americans questioned progress or where it would take us.
But the last half of the 20th century and these two decades since, have been great teachers of what happens when human health falters and something so valuable as full-time tenders of home are missing. Because home tending and the good care of children are foundational to human wellness, the loss of home tenders is painful, and our learning has become immense: 40% of American children have one or more of 20 chronic conditions, 1 in 6 is developmentally delayed or disabled, 1 in 44 is on the autism spectrum (in boys the rate is 4.2 times higher). (CDC data: here, here, here)
The dilemma this presents for healing and wellness becomes obvious. Perhaps even frightening 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.
A few decades after women began moving into the workplace, researchers in multiple fields and medical practitioners in alternative clinics began finding the reasons for rising rates of chronic disease: lifestyle, diet, toxins, traumas, and more. But by this time home had lost our awareness, the workplace held our attention, and pharmaceutical medicine had secured its powerful grip on both doctors and patients. Home had slipped from our attention, and home tenders had even further lost their value.
Where does this leave us? Hopefully with a new awareness that makes us thirsty for better, deeper understanding about why Americans are so unwell, why mental illness is raging, why chronic disease is so stubborn, why too many of our children are failing to thrive.
We need more humans who know how to create sacred, healing home spaces and who enjoy nurturing children into balanced and caring adults. Their gender does not matter, but their skills and commitment do.
And we need to wrap our minds around the concept of ‘regenerative caregiving’. Beyond the army of ‘custodial caregivers’ now helping elders and the sick and disabled, we need even more humans who can tend the space where chronic disease can be changed, and do so with the knowledge we now possess.
This means seeing our home spaces through a different lens. It means giving home equal attention to the workplace, learning what prevention and healing of disease truly means, and valuing those who keep our homes healthy and nourishing for all who live there.
Let’s look at just three things, in addition to lifestyle and diet, that are largely home-based and have significant impact on the body-mind-spirit’s ability to self-heal.
Home is where children come to understand the world around them and how to value themselves. A sense of self-worth is important, including in healing. When a leading natural health practitioner accepted complex cancer patients, he applied a unique form of assessment to determine whether the prospective patient actually valued themselves enough to do the work required. When assessed, the patient’s subconscious responded positively or negatively to two statements: ‘I deserve to be well’ and ‘I can do what it takes to be well’. Negative beliefs can thwart healing, especially deep-seated beliefs that often begin in childhood and within the home space.
The role trauma plays in illness and in healing is receiving focused attention today. Most trauma remains unconscious, and some of it comes from childhood, from our relationships with parents and in the home setting. What if parents learn to spot trauma when it happens and know how to deal with it effectively? Clearing trauma early can make a huge difference in a child’s functioning at all stages of life. Yet, this takes more time and ability than most homes and parents have today. But what if they did? And what if trauma is larger than we commonly know? What if trauma can be generational, passed on to offspring and down through the family line? As it has been with slavery, soldiers in wars, and immigrants or anyone in unavoidably dangerous situations.
What if toxins, like trauma, can be passed to offspring? What if this toxic era of human industrial activity is a time bomb waiting to go off in future generations? And what if we don’t take the time in this generation to heal ourselves? Will human homes in the future be ready to treat the tsunami of illness that toxins and trauma alone have caused? Will our homes be places that can awaken the brilliance of the body-mind-spirit for healing?
In America, money is how we value things. Is this how we shall value these tenders of home? Would a two-income household be willing to give half of its income to a full-time home caregiver? Some might, but most could not afford to. Where does this leave us in fairly valuing (with money) those who commit to full time home and human care? Respect, love, and security are other means of value. Respect and love are intangible things we all need, but are they enough? And security? Who will guarantee home tenders equal retirement to well-paid professionals, entrepreneurs, or skilled trades people?
We have a dilemma. How can we value these very essential home workers who are so necessary to health and wellness? Will we be able to regenerate our homes and ourselves without fully valuing those who commit to the skilled work and long hours that are required to do so?
This post is but an introduction to a needed conversation about equality between workplace and home, about role equity between home tenders and providers. In future posts we want to advance this conversation and talk more about the contributions both roles - provider and nurturer - make to creating and maintaining wellness, to making America truly healthy.
Next Up: “A Tragic Blind Spot: Toxins in America”
Coming Up: “What If My Body Is Brilliant?” (a guest post)
This is such an important conversation. Nancy, your thoughts and questions are so insightful. This is something I have thought about a lot and struggled with in my own life—torn between economic necessities and the desire to create the kind of healing home environment you describe.