This paper examines how employers in the recruitment of young people/university graduates are seeking information on the domestic tasks they undertake in their home environment. Human Resources Departments when selecting for highly competitive positions are using new and innovative recruitment techniques which include individual and group questions around experience in and attitudes towards domestic tasks during childhood, adolescence and university years.

Each of us is an integral part of a larger ecosystem, the natural environment, where we all belong. Therefore, we should rather consider it as our common home, instead of neglecting it as if it were somebody else’s business. The future of the ecosystem depends upon everybody’s sense of responsibility and commitment, whereas the way we care for the natural environment is largely about making changes in our daily lives.

Human Geography is located at the crossroads of the natural and social sciences. It does not provide its own definition of what constitutes a home, nor give the ultimate explanation of this reality. Rather, it apprehends the findings of other sciences and applies them to the home as a spatial and social reality.

The legal, policy and economic issues associated with pension provision, lifetime financial sustainability, and care and dignity in old age and their implications for home life are fundamental challenges for the future of our society. Pension provision is in crisis and this chapter highlights the crucial policy choices and regulatory challenges. It considers the importance of the ‘nuclear family’ and the ‘extended family’ in the provision of care, from child care to old age care.

This chapter argues that mainstream economics cannot provide an adequate theoretical setup to deal with the family conceived as the place (i.e. the home) where nature and culture cohabit and where interpersonal relations are founded upon the principle of reciprocity. To defend such a thesis, the chapter advances a substantive, not formal, definition of the family, focusing on its constitutive elements.

This chapter considers empirical evidence about the effective socialization of the home—that is, a stable marriage—in the lives of adult children. Social scientists have mapped the trajectory of marriage from its status as an institution to its voluntary and tenuous existence today.

Adverse home circumstances can have lifelong effects on children. Poor parenting leads to a series of biological effects which can potentially compromise health and educational attainment, and increase risk of criminal behaviour. Young people who experience adversity in the home can face a difficult future which could lead, in turn, to adverse effects on their own children.

Emmanuel Lévinas builds his philosophy on the thesis that the ‘other’ comes before the ‘self’, representing a shift in Western philosophy traditionally centred on being and committed to the self. This self-centred philosophy has led to the violence of the self-proclaimed sovereignty of the individual.

This chapter deals with the ontology of the home. We propose to define the home as a lighted house. But what is a house? It has a particular structure within the parameters of the spatial, the temporal and the functional. It is within but open, it is always for now and it is care for human beings.

The idea(l) of the home as the place where people “naturally” want to stay or return to, and as a unique source of protection, privacy and self-achievement, has an extended intellectual history and cultural prevalence, with its own socio-economic determinants, at least in Western countries. What the home means in practice besides brick and mortar, under what conditions it is indeed a source of home-like feelings, and to the benefit of whom, are all – however – more complex and elusive questions.