Is there still, No Place Like Home?

Once Upon a Time, There Was No Place Like Home.

There has been an increase in single family housing sales as people during the pandemic have gone to market to seek out dwellings that will accommodate home offices and also space for their children to attend online school without the distractions of family life.? I have myself recently succumbed to the Covid home buying market and bought my first home in May 2021.? This is an interesting dichotomy as you parallel this with the precarious financial status of many American families prior to and living through the Covid 19 pandemic.??

As Newkirk (2019) highlights:??

“Functionally, one to two missed paychecks sent many federal workers—many of whom have solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class incomes—temporarily into the ranks of poverty. They looked to other means to pay their bills: Some tapped into retirement accounts, some took on interest from bridge or payday loans, some racked up debt on credit cards, and some even resorted to pawn shops. For many federal workers, the gap between paychecks was enough to qualify them for monthly food-stamp benefits”.????

Even though I had worked remotely for four years, prior to the pandemic, I was flying throughout the country to meet with hospital clients in their offices.? So being on lockdown did precipitate a need for me to have formal work from the home office that was organized and zoom ready.? Prior to the pandemic, I lived in a two-bedroom townhouse and my office was my living room.? Not exactly the environment you want in the background with a hospital executive, while my partner is in the background cooking lunch and or the dogs rolling around on the couch.? The virtual office and nonlinear work days have been thrust upon us due to the pandemic.??

However, I believe this must be approached with deliberate analysis.? Will the famous quote from The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” become a thing of the past?? I say this as home has been the refuge from the stressors of life, school with their bullies, and work with an unrealistic and demanding boss.? The blurring of lines of school and work being integrated into the home has broken down that very safe place that we have held dear for so many years.??

Yet, we must look even closer at the threat to the youth that for all of 2020 and most of 2021 were exposed to and that is lack of socialization.? School has more than one function.? Naturally, school is to instill knowledge into the minds of youth to make them productive citizens.? However, school is also a social institution especially during elementary.? During this age cohort, youth are exposed to other students and develop through Mead’s concept of the “Generalized Other” as well as Cooley’s concepts of the “Looking Glass Self”.? The danger in virtual learning is that the elementary aged student will not receive the full benefit of the social institution of school and take on the role of the Generalized Other.? The generalized other allows the youth to assimilate the values of the society at large.? Also, with Cooley’s concept of the “Looking Glass Self”, the student is void of the process that posits that there can be no I until there is a they.? Without this process the youth is unable to build perceptions of how they appear to others, how others judge them and lastly their feelings about that judgment (Henslin, 2019).?

I recently watched a parody about a single mom that was angry that she could not teach her child the concepts of fifth grade during virtual online schooling.? While we may find this humorous and even oxymoronic that high school and college graduates are unable to teach their children fifth grade concepts, we must remember that teaching is a profession.? It is not simply arithmetic or geography, but the science and the art behind the process of learning.? While not humorous at all, parents throughout the US have struggled during the pandemic to juggle work and to somehow engage their young students at home in an environment that is at best not conducive to early childhood learning.? Yet lingering are the problems of “adulting” and the new wonders of working from home.??

Interestingly enough, prior to Covid, the French and German governments had already identified heightened stress from 24/7 connectivity to work through emails and cellular phones and both had passed laws protecting its citizens from this stress in the name of “Right to Disconnect.”? There is a real danger that working from home will compound upon role overload as parents already struggle with balancing the stress and strains of parenting and advancing at work or merely staying afloat with all the expectations.? We cannot forget about the Whitehall study in England where the further you go down from the top of the corporate ladder the greater your risk for death from heart disease and heart attack (Marmot & Brunner, 2005).? This is a very real concern with the virtual home office and non-linear work days as the body will never have time to reset its stress response and possibly per Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) many of us will enter into the Exhaustion Phase and never exit that stage.? The exhaustion stage leads to weathering of the body and early death (Sharma, 2017). ? The stress is also compounded by Goffman’s theory that “Life is Theatre.”? If we never have a break from the stage and are always working in “face-work” there is no time to recover and think about the next act or how to make the next performance better.? If we have no downtime from work, we run the risk of possibly being in “wrong face” or worse be “out of face” (Henslin, 2019).?

The health impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic have been multi-faceted.? In addition to the impact of illness, loss of loved ones, and threat of death, Covid 19 has also placed major stressors upon the citizenry related to Digital Health and the Right to Disconnect.? Also lurking beneath the surface is that Covid 19 has removed the ability to easily connect to one another.? Social connectedness has amazing health benefits that are now being fully understood.? It should not be shocking to us as humans as we are gregarious creatures, yet our technology boom and isolation from Covid 19 may be making us unhealthier than we are aware.? Are we literally slowly killing ourselves sitting behind these laptops and mobile devices while interacting in the outside world like characters in The Matrix???

As related by Cockerham (2017):

“Robert Putnam (2000) emphasizes the cohesion of networks.? Putnam defines social capital as a community-level resource reflected in social relationships involving not only networks but also norms and levels of trust.? He maintains that the positive influences of social capital on health are derived from enhanced self-esteem, sense of support, access to group and organizational resources and its buffering qualities in stressful situations.? Social connectedness, in Putnam’s view, is one of the most powerful determinants of health. After reviewing several studies, he found that people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes when compared with similar individuals having close ties to family and friends” (136).?

Sociologically, it will be interesting how families will re-emerge back from Covid 19 as it relates to roles within the family unit.? Since WWII, major gains have been made socializing “norms” as it relates to women in the workforce.??

According to Cockerham (2017):?

“Most research shows that while women’s work hours and responsibilities increased, men’s time adding to the household labor did not substantially rise in response (Percheski 2008).? Therefore, while women were finding meaningful work and entering more jobs and occupations, many had a second shift, working for pay during the day and working for the family each evening (Hochschild 1989).? As work roles changed, divorce rates and single parent households headed by females also increased” (p. 89).??

So, I wonder as women with spouses and children return to the workforce after Covid 19, will the past inform the present and future.? Or will their spouses take on more shared responsibility in the home to allow for more equity for both parents in the two spheres of work and home?? Only time will tell if one day we all can click our heels together again and relate, “There is no place like home.”

References

Cockerham, W. (2017). Medical sociology (14th ed).? New York: Routledge.

Henslin, J. (2019). Sociology a down to earth approach (14th ed). Boston: Pearson.?

Michael Marmot, Eric Brunner, Cohort Profile: The Whitehall II study, International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 34, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 251–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyh372

Sharma, M. (2017). Theoretical foundations of health education and health promotion (3rd ed). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett.