Home and Family

The Home

A Home is neither a Building with comforts nor the persons residing together as a family unit but a harmonious composition of the two sets. Thus, genesis of a home is the family with the building sheltering it as facility for satisfying needs of each of the family members.

Need and Purpose of a Home

Food and safety of life are two most basic requirements of a living-being for which all living-beings need to work. Humans work for a little more than that, say for luxuries. The work is a chain of activities continuing for the whole life, because of the basic needs of food and safety continuing from birth to death. On time scale, work is divided into basic units of day's work after which a person needs respite from work which may also be called a recess. During this recess, the most important thing that a person does is relaxation, relaxation from stresses of work. Duration, place and associations for the relaxation and as aids for it are combined called HOME of the person.

In addition to the above-said relaxation as the basic provision of a home, a home has yet another purpose - to rear-up and gear-up children to be responsible and happy citizens of the World of tomorrow. This is essential for continuing life on the planet Earth.  

So, home is not only a physical location but also includes an environment congenial for relaxation, the environment made with associates - made of family members or like-minded persons, at a comfortably sheltering place, for a period long enough to wipe out stresses of work from the mind of the person.

Since the home is basically meant to wipe off stresses, no place or association or environment can be called a home of a person if it produces more of stresses in the person's mind. Tragedy of life of most of the modern humans is that they don't make or find homes for themselves, but just a place for change of routines from those of the work place.

Here is an outline of making and being at home for individuals, like the birds have their nests for relaxing and rearing their offspring.   

The Family

Home is the place where family members meet and live in togetherness, caring for and sharing with each other. Family means a chain of persons making different generations linked to each other through well defined relationships. There may be 3, 4 or more of generations in a wholesome family. Through the generational and experiential differences, they learn the arts of life from each other.

Modern concept of modular families made up of parents and their children creates deficiency in learning and informal education of the children. This concept doesn't fulfill ideal conditions of having a home which needs a minimum of 3 generations residing in a home.

Human life is divided into four segments - Veterans, Matured, Youths and Children. A combination of persons falling in these four sections makes a complete family. With respect to the family's bread earner, these four types of family members make Parents, Sef and Wife, Younger Brothers and Sisters, and the Children. While the two senior types of persons are married, other two types are unmarried. Conventionally, any body getting married creates a new family unit sooner or later. Any deficiency with respect to these four types of persons makes a deficient growth of the family members. Very often and on an average, family members of these four segments are aged 60+, 30 to 60, 20 to 30, and below 20 years, respectively and sum up to 8 or 9 in number with 2 members of each segment except the children and a convention of 3 issues produced by a couple. Wide variations in these ages and numbers are possible for many obvious reasons.

The Shelter

A house in which members of a family usually reside particularly during their period of relaxation is also called their 'home', in physical terms. Purpose of this shelter is to provde a feeling of being 'at home' and relaxed to every family member through their mutual care and share, physical safety from tough weather conditions and wild dangers, and a place to dorm. Though the home is to provide conveniences to its inhabitants, in modern societies, it is seen as a status symbol of the family members, hence added with facilities of comfort and luxury. This trend is not in line with considerations of human values.