HoH, head of household

Three letters that carry more history than most people using them realise. Worth knowing where the term comes from, because the assumptions travel with it whether or not anybody intends them to.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Adults only. This describes arrangements between consenting people over 18.

What it means

HoH stands for head of household. In a domestic discipline arrangement, it names the person who holds the agreed authority: who sets or approves the rules, who checks whether they were kept, and who delivers whatever consequence was agreed.

The paired term is TiH, taken in hand, for the other person. You will also see TTWD, this thing we do, which is how people online refer to the whole business when they would rather not name it, and DD for the practice itself.

In practice the role is far less grand than the title implies. Most of what an HoH actually does is remember things: what was agreed, what was said last week, whether the check-in happened. Consistency is the job. The authoritative part is about a quarter of it.

Where it comes from

The term arrived from Christian domestic discipline, usually shortened to CDD, which developed largely in American evangelical circles in the late twentieth century. There, headship is understood as a scriptural arrangement within marriage rather than something the couple invented, and head of household is a description of an office rather than a nickname.

That matters, because of what follows from it. If the authority comes from outside the relationship, it is not in principle something the wife can withdraw. If the authority is lent by one adult to another, it can be taken back in a sentence. Those are not two flavours of the same arrangement, and the site sets out the difference properly on domestic discipline, secularly.

The older English phrase for roughly the same idea is taken in hand, which predates the American vocabulary and carried none of the theology. Online communities later borrowed it for the TiH abbreviation, which is a small piece of linguistic archaeology I find quite pleasing.

In practice

Secular couples who use the term generally mean something modest by it: one person holds a defined authority over a defined patch, by agreement, for as long as both of them want the arrangement. That is a reasonable thing for adults to want, and the word is available to anybody who likes the formality of it.

My own view, held moderately, is that borrowed vocabulary brings its assumptions in through the back door. Somebody who starts calling himself the head of household on Tuesday can find himself six months later reaching for arguments the phrase came packaged with, about roles and natural order, which nobody actually agreed to. If you use the term, notice what it starts doing.

And the direction is not fixed. It very often runs man to woman, for reasons of where the vocabulary came from rather than anything logical, but I know arrangements running the other way and one where it alternated by agreement.