I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, the scion of a distinctly middle-class family. Still, I regard myself as among the world’s most privileged people in at least one respect: I spent my entire childhood as part of stable and fully functioning household.

Built and maintained by the parents pictured above, the place where i grew up was far from perfect, but it was a haven of comparative peace, stability, security, love, and (so) hope and creativity. It was simultaneously a safe physical space, a place of learning where raising questions was encouraged (even as listening was required), and an emotional environment of care and support. Since my father passed away earlier this year, I have reflected repeatedly on the fact that the cultivation and care of such spaces is likely the most important work any of us will ever do.

Admittedly, there’s nothing particularly original about this insight. It amounts to saying something like “family comes first” in combination with something like “you can’t take it with you,” then adding the obvious point that “physical spaces are essential to emotional, moral, and intellectual development.”

What has struck me recently, however, is a broad failure in our culture to celebrate and fully support the people who actually put their households first. Our culture idolizes the creation of wealth and power and fame. It largely neglects the people who build and maintain the households that enable groups of people to function as families (whatever the biological connections among them) and who thereby, to a significant degree, hold society itself together.

We are all bombarded daily with images and narratives that glorify people with big egos and fancy lifestyles—media that implicitly valorize greed and the pursuit of power. Meanwhile, we mostly pay lip service to caring for the caregivers among us. We recognize them here and there, of course, but often with a whiff of condescension—as if they were mere support staff, the “wind beneath the wings” of so-called higher achievers. In so doing, we neglect the people, conditions, and spaces that nurture kindness, compassion, creativity, and the improvement of our society and even our species.

Note that this not an implicit suggestion that we need to return to some mythical familial past from which sexism and racism have been conveniently erased. I’m not suggesting that we need to go backward. I am suggesting, however, that we need to create a culture that recognizes and celebrates the people who do the never-ending work of building and rebuilding fully functioning households.

These people are not centrally defined by their gender identities, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, or belief systems. They are centrally defined by their willingness to place the needs of others above their own and to work for the benefit of something more than their own egotistical selves. They are centrally defined by being people actively engaged in the work of building households that they share with others who constitute their families, regardless of the biological or legal relationships between them.

If our society fails these people, I would argue, then we will realize soon enough that our society has failed itself.