Definition Essay: What Is A Home?

What is a home? Where is a home? For some, their house would be the first thing to come to mind. For others, maybe an entire city would pop into their heads. For another person, maybe multiple places come to mind. To create a single, universal home for every single person in the world would be impossible because different people have different places that they choose to call home. Some even have multiple place they might call home. To ask someone where home is for them is becoming an increasingly difficult question to answer because so many different people define home in completely different ways. The saying “home is where the heart is,” while completely cliché, is absolutely accurate (if not taken too literally). In terms of place,

While this definition might fit the traditional ideal of what home is, the only reason that it fits is because it is so customary in American culture to live in a single house for most of a person’s life. This home is where they would grow up and create memories. This is a very stereotypical notion of home portrayed in the media. “Home” decorating shows, articles, and other things of the sort cater to the “home” that is a house in which people live, so it has simply become customary to assume that a person’s house is their home. However, for those who do not lead traditional lifestyles (for example: those with family members in the navy, military, or really any job that requires frequent movement) they do not feel attached in any way to the house that they live in. Maybe they do not even live in a house or apartment. For example, it is possible for a person who is homeless to consider a certain space their

America was founded based on the principles of exploration and discovery. The Pew Social and Demographic Trends survey of two thousand two-hundred-sixty adults in October 2008, 38% of people born in the U.S. said they do not consider the place in which they currently lived was their home (Cohn). Among those who were born outside of the United States, 26% said that their home is where they were born or raised, 22% said it is where they live now, 18% say that it was where they lived the longest, 15% said home is where their family came from, and 4% said home was where they went to high school (Cohn). Very few people actually considered where they lived in a specific moment to be their home compared to the amount of people who considered places in which they were raised or lived in for extended periods of time to be their homes. These two categories are places in which people are able to develop emotional attachments to. People generally do not call places they do not know their homes. They are more likely to be attached to the places they are raised because it is where they spent their childhoods, grew up in, and