CS Lewis in his brilliant and cutting essay, ‘On the Appeal and Challenges of Home Life’ from God in the Dock and featuring in How to be a Christian, sums up the contradiction that exists in the family home namely that, ‘Charity begins at home: so, does uncharity.’

Not for Lewis are the Cath Kidston tea towels or sepia tinted posters telling us that ‘home is where the heart is.’ Lewis doesn’t sugar coat the domestic church or dress it up in sentimental ideas – this essay really does speak to the brutal reality of even the best Christian homes; they are often places where uncharity thrives.

In Lewis’s brilliant observation he says, ‘What chiefly distinguishes domestic from public conversation is surely very often simply its downright rudeness. What distinguishes domestic behaviour is often its selfishness, slovenliness, incivility – even brutality.’ 

Lewis continues that often the ‘our true selves’ that we are ‘free to be at home’ are in fact, the very worst of us. ‘If they (those who praise home life most loudly) practised elsewhere the only behaviour they now find ‘natural’ (in the home) they would simply be knocked down.’ Was ever a truer word spoken? 

The truth is, while most of us make huge efforts to be kind and thoughtful to friends, schools mums, employers and employees, once we get home and no longer have to make an effort with spouse or children, we can be absolutely beastly. 

I believe this beastly at-home behaviour has only been made worse by the new phenomenon of ‘working from home’. On Tuesday it was reported that staff are still refusing to return to the offices after the pandemic. ‘Workers are resisting pressures from their employers to return to the office’ according to a survey. This might be bad news for employers. I certainly believe it is bad news for home life. Indeed, working from home is just the latest attack on the home and in particular on children, in a long line of attacks. 

It is bad enough that homes are barely places where children grow up in, play or indeed are looked after by their mothers. Most children are now shunted into nurseries from a very young age as both parents working is a necessity to maintain a basic standard of living. Politicians were more than happy to unite with ruthless capitalism to make sure the double-income family became the norm. This meant more tax revenue for governments and more workers for the employers – a win-win. It also meant less time for children at home and indeed less children overall, as the fertility rate continues to decline throughout the West. 

Vested interests, having chased the mothers out of the home have now created an even greater horror – that is chasing mothers and the fathers back into the home not to spend time with each other or to eat together or to care for young children but to ‘work from home.’ This is a fresh hell, if you ask me. 

So, the home is no longer a place of refuge or a place for noisy children to play but it is now a place of work, a place of ‘important’ phone calls, zoom calls, and a place where mummy and daddy are having important conference meetings with someone on the computer screen. It is a place indeed where daddy must send ‘one more e-mail.’ Not even Dante could do justice to this particular circle of hell. 

In fact, these days, families don’t have bedrooms with bunk beds to accommodate the three or four children they had; they don’t use that tiny box room for a nursery – no that room is now The Home Office. Lord, spare me from The Home Office. Even worse is the development where the kitchen table isn’t a place where the family eat and argue but is a place for laptops and mobile phones and iPads. This should not be accepted as normal. This is not how sane people should live their lives. 

The work from home phenomenon is often seen as a bad thing for employers, but I am much more worried about its impact on the private sphere. In fact, it is the near total erosion of the private sphere that I resent the most. Families must accommodate all the work paraphernalia when the home is just an extension of the office and they must cope with all the extra stress that turning the home into the work place involves. Never mind separation of church and state – how about separation of work and home? In short, I resent the stressed-out atmosphere that the zoom calls, conference calls, and laptops create. 

It is already the case that family members are often unspeakably rude to each other, as CS Lewis explains. Indeed, we are often guilty of displaying behaviour to our family that would not be tolerated elsewhere. But what Lewis could not even anticipate is how much worse that ‘brutality’ of home life would get, once the home is turned into the work place. 

Now we have all the stress and anxiety of the office on display at home – but with none of the limitations that exist in the work place. So, if you have endured a stressful zoom meeting, you don’t even have to wait for the commute to be over before you can take it out on your wife. She is often right there in the next room – having a zoom meeting of her own. Enough!

It is time to reclaim the home. The home should not be place of work and stress and pointless zoom meetings but a place of love, affection and kindness towards husband and wife and children. It should be a place for children to be loud and annoying and to get told off for being loud and annoying. The home really should be where your heart is – so can you please get your laptop off my kitchen table; the dinner is ready.

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