The Flying Sandbox!

            

Home: take it, don’t leave it

(Tiago's article on home assignment) 

Home may be defined as one’s most essential identity. But what happens when one doesn’t have that shelter or, for some reason, escapes from it?

In the West, people may work their way into some form of independency and then choose to leave their home, not necessarily breaking up relationships with their family. Another thing is when teenagers get delusioned and think the best for them is to run away from home and try to live somewhere far from their nearest and closest. Sometimes these decisions are understandable when the parents don’t lead a normal life and have problems with drinking or drugs and often beat their children. The freedom of choice in the West is proportional to the responsibility the parental figures must have over their offspring.

In contrast, there is still an ancient way of life where tradition and social stability are the keywords. In the primitive tribes still scattered around the world, one’s reaching maturity means getting totally involved in the social life of the tribe. There is no abandoning or mistreating children or escaping home in this kind of living. For sure they feel the deepest bonds with the family but their home is the entire society; and even if they wanted, they couldn’t escape it.

It goes without saying no lifestyle or social structure is better than the other, but the comparison helps to state how the primitives seem socially cohesive but to the western eye apparently oppressive to the individual, as was the opinion of anthropologist Levi-Strauss in Sad Tropics; and how the developed countries offer more liberty to people but maybe without full notion of its implications.

Education starts at home and it’s the quality of such upbringing that can prevent regretful running away from home. There may be very few exceptions to the fact that without the strong foundation of moral values and affections that forms the early education of a person, he or she won’t overcome those deep lacks by seeking that basic identity elsewhere. It is therefore of most importance to a society that its institutions of childcare – from lawyers to guardians, to foster parents – work properly and in the interest of the lonely child’s needs.