As the heat of summer washes over the country, basic home safety becomes a concern. Sometimes, parents become worried that their messy houses might cause Child Protective Services to view them as unfit parents. A new paper from my research collaborators and I has shown that even in homes with genuine safety concerns, the beauty of a home (or lack thereof) isn’t associated with being child abuse potential or socioeconomic status. Thus, it doesn’t appear that messy homes come from abusive parenting environments, and unattractive or unsafe are just as likely to be found in poorer and richer neighborhoods.
We found that trained assessors and people inhabiting homes had reasonable agreement about the beauty of the homes, but they didn’t agree on the safety risks present in the home. Part of that may have been because the trained assessors had checklists with over 50 items to check over in each room to assess safety and appearance, whereas the occupants of the homes only provided summary ratings of room safety and appearance on a 1-6 scale. It’s probably easier to give an overall judgment of the attractiveness of a room than to summarize in your mind all the possible safety risks that exist.
Because it’s so hard to notice these safety risks without a detailed guide, the assessment we developed can also be used as a way to point parents to specific things to fix in the home to make their children’s environment safer. We didn’t want people overwhelmed when thinking about what to clean up or make safer – rather, we wanted to give people specific things to address. We’ll be interested to see if people are better able to make their homes cleaner and safer places with the help of that assessment.
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