Solitary Security: A Honeywell Survey Reveals Why People Living Alone Feel More Secure
In an age when “Helicopter Parenting” is a thing and bloggers regularly lament the lost carefree days of their youth spent exploring the far reaches of the neighborhoods until well after dusk, riding bicycles to parks without adult supervision and generally spending more summer time outside and unsupervised than not, we understand the mounting, sometimes paralyzing worry that now seems so ubiquitous among parents.
Whether fueled by wall-to-wall coverage on 24-hour news channels of every horrific kidnapping or slaying, or just by changing attitudes and ideas about the proper way to care for children, it seems clear that the times are changing with respect to how people feel about security, and the Honeywell Home Connectivity Survey conducted in summer 2015 seems to support this idea.
A surprising fact that emerges from the survey is that more than two-thirds of Americans do not always feel totally safe in their own homes; of women alone, 72 percent report not feeling safe in their homes. When you begin to parse that information, things get even more interesting.
Of respondents who live with more than one person, 71 percent feel unsafe in their homes while 58 percent of people who live alone have similar insecurities; only 14 percent of respondents living alone said they have a home security alarm compared with 25 percent of households of two or more people that said they have a security system.
One might assume that a person living alone would be more skittish about security — after all, it seems to always be the girl in a house by herself that goes first in the horror movies — but evidently the opposite is the case.
One possible reason for this disparity is parents’ natural protective instincts for their children. The survey found 75 percent of parents don’t always feel safe in their homes, while only 65 percent of non-parents indicated the same sentiment. Additionally, according to the survey 52 percent of parents fret about their homes not being secure enough while only 42 percent of their childless counterparts share the same fears.
A Honeywell Security blog by Rob Puric titled “Safety in Numbers? Not So, Survey Says” explains it like this: “First, it’s a reasonable assumption that many people who live with others feel less safe than those who live alone because those ‘other people’ they live with are their children. And any parent will tell you they naturally are always concerned for their children’s safety. And secondly, it doesn’t always have to be all about children; spouses naturally are concerned for each other’s safety as well.”
Nothing is more universally desired than a feeling of security — whether by someone walking through a neighborhood or parents putting their children to bed in their homes. When dealers know what keeps a customer up at night, they will be better equipped to offer what the customers really want: the ability to feel completely secure in their own homes. And that type of security never goes out of style.
Read Puric’s blog here: https://blogs.honeywellsecurity.com/2015/11/survey/
