Urgent Issue #4 - Stability
The Security of a Place Called 'Home'
By Lora Warkentin
The presence of a decent home plays a key role in stable families.

		Safe, secure housing helps create stable lives for children such as Emmanuel and Samuel McLean, grandsons of Habitat homeowner Enid Lewis in Guyana. —Photo by Denise Muschel

Ask a child what “home” is and you’ll invite myriad answers: “It’s a place to put my toys.” “It’s where my mama doesn’t have to be scared anymore.” “It’s where my bed is.”

At its best, home is a refuge of comfort, love and daily routine, a place to feel safe in your own bed. It is in “my home” that a child feels a sense of stability.

But for millions of people today, home exists one night at a time in precarious housing or at a friend’s or relative’s house, in a homeless shelter, or the cold darkness of a perilous city street.

There is no question that having a “real” home is important to parents and children alike, but just how significant are the consequences for families who lack safe and secure housing?

Families living in poor or no housing struggle to achieve the most foundational needs: food, water, safety and rest. When survival needs go unmet, families cannot turn their attention to higher needs such as emotional health, career and healthy relationships. Living in substandard conditions yields a constant mix of despair, stress and a preoccupation with “getting by.”

If poverty living arrangements or homelessness becomes long term or episodic, children lose trust in their parents’ ability to find and keep a decent home. Parents try to maintain some physical, emotional and spiritual strength in order to find and keep a home where children feel safe. Even so, circumstances, financial desperation and the lack of a support system conspire against them.

When children sense insecurity in their parents, they respond by acting out, causing a cyclical cause-and-effect relationship. They are caught in the dilemma of trying to love and trust a parent who cannot provide them a place of safety and security. Unless home is found soon, the entire family may succumb to an increasingly destructive situation.

Living in adequate, secure housing can serve as an anchor in a stormy world where family members find protection, comfort and togetherness. But families without a home, or with one that is substandard, lose the security of daily routines such as morning prayers, chores, regular school attendance, family dinners and bedtime stories. Without this reassuring structure, children become anxious and insecure as their lives grow unpredictable.

Without a doubt, the subject of home is emotional. Our identity with home extends well beyond just a structure on a street. In the environment of a home, parents and children are free to fail or succeed and to find acceptance in both. To be without a sense of home is to have one’s dignity threatened. As self-respect diminishes, so goes respect for others.

Certainly, the need to locate and keep secure housing is critical for parents and their children. But as the population of families living in poverty housing and homeless families increases, their misfortune becomes a community dilemma and a national tragedy, one that affects us all.

To be involved in bringing hope and opportunity to parents and children already homeless is rewarding. To be involved in preventing a family’s homelessness from occurring in the first place is heroic.

—Having spent the first eight years of her life homeless in the former Soviet Union, Lora Warkentin, R.N., D.N.S., moved with her family to Canada in 1948. Today she is the director of Cornerstone Manor, a shelter of the Buffalo City Mission for women and children in Buffalo, New York.

Making a Difference: Habitat and Stability Grant and Margaret Helmstetter, Habitat homeowners in Arizona, understand the value of stable, dependable housing. After years of living in a mobile home with floors too shaky for their daughter to learn to walk, they built their Habitat house in 1994. Margaret writes: “The wind whistling through closed windows and the feel of floorboards shifting are things we don’t miss. The benefit of a heater that warms the house on cold winter mornings includes more than warmth. Affordable utility bills, and confidence to develop our talents and build careers, not just jobs, are among the benefits. The children are developing their full potential because of the stability and comfort of our home. Our Habitat home is more than a roof and walls; it has created a feeling of success and faith in tomorrow as a family. I love being a daycare provider and freelance writer, my husband is happy as a truck driver and the children are growing up as confident individuals.” Just the Facts 24: Percentage of homeless people in the United States with full- or part-time jobs. (Ohio State University) 35.1 million: The estimated number of internally displaced people and refugees worldwide. (U.S. Committee for Refugees) 100 million: Number of homeless people worldwide. (United Nations) 22: Percentage by which homelessness increased among families in the United States in 2001. (U.S. Conference of Mayors)