Tick Tubes – What They Are, How They Work, and Why You Shouldn’t DIY Them

A tick tube looks like nothing special: a cardboard tube stuffed with treated cotton, tucked into a garden bed or along a tree line. But the idea behind it is smarter than it looks, and it attacks the tick problem from a direction most yard treatments completely ignore. Instead of spraying your grass and hoping for the best, tick tubes recruit the animal actually responsible for infecting most ticks in the first place: the mouse.

This guide covers exactly how tick tubes work, what the research actually shows about their effectiveness, why making your own is a worse idea than it sounds, and how to use them correctly if you decide they belong in your yard.

The Problem Tick Tubes Are Actually Solving

Lyme disease is not a rare inconvenience. According to the CDC, over 89,000 cases were formally reported in 2023, and the agency’s own estimates using other tracking methods suggest the real number of Americans diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year runs closer to 476,000.

The bacteria behind Lyme disease doesn’t start in the tick. It starts in small mammals, especially white-footed mice, which serve as the primary reservoir. A tick picks up the infection by feeding on an infected mouse while still in its immature larval or nymph stage, then goes on to bite a person or pet later, passing the infection along. Break that first link between mouse and tick, and you interrupt the infection cycle before it ever reaches a human.

Where Tick Tubes Came From

This isn’t a garage invention or a recent trend. The concept was developed at Harvard’s School of Public Health in the 1980s by researchers studying the ecology of the deer tick and its rodent hosts, including Dr. Andrew Spielman, one of the scientists who first described the tick species responsible for spreading Lyme disease in the northeastern United States. The resulting commercial product, sold under the name Damminix, was the first host-targeted tick control method to reach the consumer market, and it’s still sold today, alongside newer competitors using the same basic mechanism.

The core insight behind it was simple but genuinely clever: rather than trying to poison ticks directly in the environment, use the tick’s own host animal as an unpaid delivery system, carrying the pesticide straight to the ticks feeding on it.

How Tick Tubes Actually Work

A tick tube is a simple cardboard or plastic tube filled with cotton treated with permethrin, an insecticide that kills ticks on contact but is not designed to harm mammals at the concentrations used. Mice, always on the hunt for soft material to line their nests, find the treated cotton irresistible and carry it straight back to their burrows.

Once that cotton is in the nest, every tick already attached to the mouse, along with any that show up later, comes into contact with the permethrin and dies before it can fully feed and transmit disease. The mouse itself is essentially unaffected. The goal was never to kill mice, only to turn their own nest-building instinct into free tick control.

What the Research Actually Shows

This is the part most product marketing glosses over, and it deserves an honest look rather than a simple yes-it-works answer. The picture from independent field trials is genuinely mixed, and the details matter.

According to a review of field trials compiled by a CDC vector-borne disease researcher, the original 1987 Harvard study found a 90 percent reduction in ticks per animal and a 72 percent reduction in infestation rate on treated mice, and a separate 1991 study confirmed real reductions in the abundance of vector ticks. That’s a strong result for the specific question of whether tick tubes reduce ticks feeding on mice.

But two other independently conducted studies from the same era tell a more complicated story. A 1991 evaluation in southern New York found no observed difference in host-seeking ticks or the proportion of infected ticks between treated and untreated sites. A three-year study in southeastern Connecticut similarly found no measurable reduction in the risk of encountering an infected, host-seeking tick despite consistent treatment. In other words, tick tubes reliably reduced the tick burden directly on the mice they targeted, but translating that into a measurable drop in the ticks actually waiting in the grass for a person or pet to walk by has not been consistent across every independent trial.

This doesn’t mean tick tubes are worthless. It means they work best as one part of a layered strategy rather than a guaranteed standalone fix, and it’s worth setting realistic expectations rather than assuming a single product will solve a yard’s tick problem on its own.

Why This Targets the Ticks Sprays Miss

Standard yard sprays are applied to grass, shrubs, and other exposed surfaces where you’d expect ticks to be waiting to latch onto a passing person or pet. Mice, however, are nocturnal and spend their days underground or deep inside brush piles, stone walls, and other cover no sprayer can reach. A tick tube placed near that cover delivers the tick-killing agent to exactly the ticks a spray program has no way of touching, which is why the two methods are often described as complementary rather than competing.

Why You Shouldn’t Make Your Own Tick Tubes

Homemade tick tube tutorials show up constantly online, usually pitched as a way to save money on a $45 twelve-pack. According to Cornell University’s Integrated Pest Management Program, this is a genuinely bad idea for three concrete reasons, not just a matter of preference.

They Probably Won’t Work as Well as You Think

A pesticide product isn’t just its active ingredient. Commercial tick tubes are formulated with specific inert ingredients that help permethrin perform correctly for this exact use. Other permethrin products, like the kind sold for treating clothing or spraying plants, are formulated differently for their own specific listed uses, and substituting one for another doesn’t guarantee the same tick-killing performance inside a mouse nest.

It Puts People, Pets, and Pollinators at Real Risk

The EPA only registers a pesticide for a specific use after safety testing shows it poses no unreasonable risk for that exact application. Homemade tick tubes fall outside any tested and approved use. Cornell specifically flags one consequence: permethrin is highly toxic to bees, and bumble bees frequently nest in the same abandoned mouse burrows that tick tubes are designed to reach, creating a real risk to wild pollinators that a properly tested commercial formulation is designed to minimize.

It’s Actually Against the Law

Every permethrin product label states plainly that it’s a federal violation to use the product in any way inconsistent with its labeling. Repurposing a permethrin spray or concentrate into a homemade tick tube isn’t a gray area or a technicality. It’s a violation of both federal and state pesticide law, regardless of good intentions.

How to Use Tick Tubes Properly

• Place tubes along the edges of your property, near stone walls, wood piles, leaf litter, and brush, the exact cover mice favor, rather than out in the open lawn
• A commonly cited rule of thumb is roughly six tubes for a quarter-acre yard, applied twice a year, though official label guidance for one widely sold brand scales this up to about 24 tubes for a half-acre and 96 tubes for two acres or more of habitat, so always check your specific product’s label rather than assuming one flat number applies to every property size
• Space tubes no more than about 10 yards apart in wooded or brush-covered areas for even coverage across the whole treated zone
• Focus placement in shaded, protected areas along the woodland edge, since mice rarely venture far into open, sunny lawn areas
• Replace or reapply according to the product’s specific label instructions, since potency and duration vary by brand and formulation

Timing Matters More Than You’d Expect

A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Ecosphere tracked how much treated cotton mice actually removed from tick tubes across different months and found consistently higher uptake in cooler fall months, with October showing the highest use and July the lowest. Cotton size and added food-based attractants like peanut butter didn’t meaningfully change how much mice took, but the season did.

The practical takeaway: don’t treat tick tube placement as a one-time spring chore and forget about it. A fall application, timed to when mice are most actively gathering nesting material, may be doing more work than most people realize.

What Tick Tubes Won’t Do

• They won’t eliminate every tick on your property, since ticks also arrive on deer, birds, and other wildlife that tick tubes don’t target
• They work over a season, not overnight. Don’t expect an immediate drop in tick sightings right after placing them
• They’re a population-level tool, not a personal barrier. You still need direct protection like permethrin-treated clothing when you’re actually out in tick habitat
• They don’t replace basic yard maintenance. Clearing leaf litter, keeping grass trimmed, and creating a buffer zone between lawn and woods all matter alongside tick tubes

Tick Tubes vs. Other Tick Control Methods

Tick tubes work best as one layer in a broader approach rather than a standalone solution.

• Yard sprays: Treat exposed grass and vegetation where ticks wait for a host, but can’t reach ticks sheltering with mice underground or in brush
• Permethrin-treated clothing: Kills ticks on contact with treated fabric and remains effective through multiple washes, offering direct personal protection tick tubes don’t provide
• Habitat modification: Removing leaf litter, brush piles, and tall grass reduces the cover both ticks and their rodent hosts rely on in the first place

Used together, these methods cover the gaps each one leaves on its own. Relying on only one is where most yard tick problems persist despite genuine effort.

Common Mistakes

• Making homemade tick tubes from a different permethrin product, risking both poor performance and real legal and environmental exposure
• Placing tubes out in open lawn instead of near the brush, wood piles, and edge habitat mice actually use
• Treating it as a single spring application rather than reapplying in fall when mouse nesting activity increases
• Expecting tick tubes alone to eliminate tick exposure without pairing them with personal protection and yard maintenance
• Assuming more tubes packed into a small area works better than following labeled placement density

Real Independence Takes More Than One Line of Defense

Keeping ticks away from your property is one small part of protecting the people who depend on you. But real self-reliance goes much further.

What happens when the problem isn’t something you can solve with a product from the store? What if the power stays out, supplies become difficult to find, food prices keep climbing, or the everyday systems you’ve always depended on simply stop working?

Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew how to handle problems like these because they possessed practical skills that have largely disappeared from modern life.

The Lost Skills of Independence brings that knowledge back.

Inside, you’ll rediscover traditional skills for growing and preserving food, making useful household necessities, working with what you already have, becoming less dependent on stores and modern conveniences, and building a more resilient home and homestead.

These aren’t skills meant only for some distant worst-case scenario. They’re the kind of practical knowledge that can save money, reduce waste, solve everyday problems, and give you more control over how your family lives right now.

You don’t have to abandon modern life to become more independent. You simply need to make sure that when modern conveniences fail, you still know what to do.

Discover the forgotten skills that helped previous generations provide for themselves – and start bringing them back into your own home today.

Click here to learn more about The Lost Skills of Independence!

Frequently Asked Questions

Are tick tubes safe for my dog or cat?

Commercial tick tubes are formulated and tested for the specific use of treating mouse nesting material, and permethrin at the concentrations used is not intended to pose a hazard to pets that don’t ingest the treated cotton directly. That said, always follow the specific product’s safety guidance, and note that permethrin products applied directly to cats can be genuinely dangerous, which is a separate issue from tick tubes themselves.

How long does one application of tick tubes last?

This varies by product, but a common pattern is reapplying roughly twice a year, often in spring and again in fall, to align with mouse nesting activity.

Do tick tubes work in a wooded, rural setting the same way they do in a suburban yard?

The underlying mechanism works the same way anywhere mice are present, though a heavily wooded rural property may have a larger mouse population and more habitat overall, which could mean needing more tubes or a more deliberate placement strategy along the specific travel corridors mice use.

Can I use tick tubes if I keep backyard chickens or other livestock?

Place tubes away from areas your animals have direct access to, and follow the product label’s specific guidance regarding livestock and poultry, since label instructions account for these use scenarios more precisely than general guidance can.

If tick tubes don’t always reduce host-seeking ticks, why bother?

Because the research showing mixed results on host-seeking tick abundance still consistently shows real reductions in ticks feeding directly on mice, which does interrupt part of the disease transmission cycle. Combined with personal protection and habitat management, tick tubes remain a reasonable, low-toxicity piece of a broader strategy, just not a magic fix used in isolation.

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Infrastructure On The Edge: Bridges, Dams, And Grids That Are Past Their Expiration Date

A lot of emergencies do not begin with a foreign enemy, a civil collapse, or some dramatic event on the evening news. Sometimes they begin with a bridge that should have been repaired years ago. Sometimes they begin with a dam that has been patched, inspected, warned about, and ignored. Sometimes they begin with an […]

from Survivopedia

Let’s Have a Look Inside the Doomsday Bunkers of the 1%

Somewhere near Washington D.C., a company is spending $300 million to dig a luxury apartment complex 200 feet into the ground. The swimming pool sits 20 stories down but looks like it’s perched on the edge of a cliff. Robots run the medical wing. A single membership costs $20 million, and only 625 people will ever hold one.

The project is called Aerie, built by a Virginia firm named SAFE, short for Strategically Armored and Fortified Environments. They’ve spent decades building panic rooms and fortified estates for the mega-rich, including one home with its own Formula 1 track.

Aerie is their biggest swing yet: a members-only survival club marketed as a five-star way to ride out nuclear fallout, an EMP that fries the grid, or the kind of civil breakdown that tends to follow either one.

Forbes got the full tour. The details are worth your time, because they show you what the richest people alive are actually afraid of, and where they’re about to sink a fortune into the wrong things.

What $300 Million Buys You Underground

The first Aerie will run more than 20 stories deep, with room for over 200 apartments. The smallest is a 2,000-square-foot suite. The largest are multi-level penthouses topping 20,000 square feet, all of it buried 200 feet below the surface. Only the rooftop penthouse sits above ground. Everything else is underground for security.

To keep residents from feeling like they’re living in a hole, the walls and ceilings are giant screens that simulate open views, so a pool 20 stories down looks like it’s floating over a skyline:

AI-Generated luxury bunker

SAFE calls each unit an NBCET sanctuary, meaning it’s built to hold up against nuclear, biological, chemical, electromagnetic, and technological attack. Getting in means clearing biometric scanners and tactical mantraps, the layered entry designed to trap an intruder between locked doors before they ever reach the living space.

AI-Generated luxury bunker – bedroom

Then there’s the medical wing, which is where the marketing gets loud. It’s called MediShield, an AI-run intensive care unit with robotic imaging, robotic nurses running IV therapy, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and an ice plunge for recovery. SAFE claims it delivers the same standard of care as the White House Medical Unit. 

AI Generated luxury bunker – the medical facility

Add a gourmet dining program, a bowling alley, and a climbing wall, and you start to see the pitch. This is survival with room service.

Why the Wealthy Are Digging In

Aerie is only the first. SAFE wants 50 of them across U.S. cities and around a thousand affiliate sites worldwide. And these people aren’t alone.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound reportedly includes an underground shelter. Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian have both been tied to similar builds. When people with access to the best private security briefings on earth start spending this kind of money to get underground, that’s a signal worth reading.

SAFE’s founder, Al Corbi, doesn’t soften it. He describes a massive solar flare knocking out the global grid, supply chains failing within hours, and society coming apart soon after. He calls that a likely reality rather than a movie plot.

The company also says the idea for Aerie came partly from a client who spent $10 million on home security and was still shot dead by a gunman at a concert, away from all that protection. The lesson the rich took from it: safety has to travel with you.

So far, so reasonable. A seasoned prepper would agree with most of that premise. The disagreement starts the moment you look at how they’re solving it.

The Problem With a Bunker That Runs on Robots

Every headline amenity in Aerie depends on things that break. The AI medical suites need power and a steady stream of software updates. The robotic nurses need spare parts and someone on site who can actually repair them. Even the digital walls go dark the second the power supply hiccups. The more complex a system is, the more ways it can fail, and the harder it is to fix once SHTF.

So, a robot surgeon is impressive on day three. On day 300, with no replacement sensors and no engineer on call, it’s a very expensive gadget. Anyone who has nursed a generator through a long outage already knows how this goes: the complicated gear fails first, and it fails right when you need it. A hand pump keeps working long after the smart pump quits.

That’s why other projects beat a luxury bunker. For example, this root cellar was approved by a nuclear inspector and comes with sturdy blueprints. It’s built to hold up against a nuclear event, a blackout, and an EMP, with a setup that keeps it from ever running out of electricity.

Best of all, it costs a tiny fraction of what the rich sink into their shelters. Most backyard builds like this run somewhere around $400 to $1,500 in materials, depending on size and what you already have on hand, next to nothing against a bunker that runs into the millions.

If you’re interested in the plans, you can see a preview here. 

The Food Problem Money Can’t Solve

None of these luxury bunkers grow food. They store it. Even a warehouse of gourmet supplies has an end date, and 625 people eat through a pantry faster than any brochure wants to admit. Gourmet dining underground assumes fresh deliveries keep arriving, which is exactly the assumption a real collapse tears up.

A family with a garden, saved seed, a few chickens, and the know-how to can and preserve a harvest has something no $20 million membership includes: food that renews itself. That’s the irony of the whole project. The ultra-rich are paying a fortune to store what a self-reliant household already produces in the backyard for the price of some labor and a growing season.

But growing food underground, with no light, can be a tricky business. Even so, there are 6 forgotten tricks that will help you have fresh produce underground. One of them is a Walipini, a pit greenhouse the Bolivians perfected high in the Andes. Even during winter, the ground stays warm enough to grow greens, tomatoes, and peppers. 

Also, did you know there’s one crop that grows in complete darkness? It might be the single most valuable thing you can produce when you’re stuck below ground. 

A Known Bunker Is a Target

A publicized luxury shelter holding hundreds of billionaires is close to the worst-kept secret in the survival world. The construction crews, the vendors, the staff, they all know exactly where it sits. In a genuine breakdown, desperate people move toward resources, and a glowing fortress full of the wealthy is a beacon that pulls trouble straight to the door.

There’s a deeper crack in the plan, and SAFE all but admits it. Corbi says their systems are built to give the owner control, “not their staff.” Sit with that for a second. They designed the security around the possibility that the people running the place turn on the people who own it. When the money that pays the guards and the robot technicians becomes worthless paper, what keeps the staff loyal? A luxury bunker is only as secure as the least trustworthy person who knows the door codes.

While the rich pour fortunes into bunkers and hire armies to guard them, the average American family is left standing in the open. Every household in the country faces the risk of burglaries, assault and riots. We have never been this vulnerable, and the wealthy know it better than anyone.

That’s why I’d urge you to watch a mind-blowing short documentary. It cuts through the noise and shows you how to secure your home against exactly these threats.:

You can’t build a $300 million fortress. What you can do is harden the home you already have, and you’d be surprised how far a few deliberate changes go. The billionaires are betting everything on concrete and robots. Your edge is being ready where you already stand, and this documentary shows you how.

What the 1% Can’t Buy

So before you envy the way these people are prepping for the end of the world, understand something. This is the most unrealistic way to do it. They’re buying their way out, sealing themselves in a bubble, betting that money and concrete will carry them through. And they’ve left out the things that actually keep a person alive.

Do you know what the rich never accounted for? The things money can’t buy:

• How to grow vegetables and fruit through the dead of winter.
• How to survive in the wild if you can’t reach your shelter.
• How to cook a real meal in a total blackout.
• How to purify water when the taps run dry.
• How to repair what breaks with your own two hands.

Couldn’t check off every box? Then you need this survival manual.

Our grandparents could do all of it without a second thought, and every one of those skills has been gathered into a single guide, laid out step by step so anyone can follow.

Click here to see the 200+ survival skills the rich forgot

They’re betting on a fortress they’ll never test. You’ll be the one who doesn’t need one.

Editor’s Note: The ultra-rich don’t hand out tours of their doomsday bunkers, so the images here are AI-generated to bring the descriptions to life.

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10 Books To Get While You Still Can

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Think about how you solve problems nowadays. Your water heater starts leaking, so you pull out your phone and look up how to fix it. Someone in the family has a strange rash, so you type the symptoms into a search bar. You want to can this year's tomato harvest, so you pull up a recipe. We take all of that for granted because the answer is always a few clicks away.

Now imagine the grid is down. Permanently. How would you solve those problems with no Internet?

When a real disaster strikes, you won't be able to order a book from Amazon or run to the nearest Barnes & Noble. You won't be able to hop online and look up whatever you need to know. All of that accumulated human knowledge that feels so accessible right now simply disappears the moment the internet does. That's exactly when you'll wish you had certain reference books sitting on your shelf.

Below are 10 categories of books worth owning before you need them, with a standout title in each and a note on why it's worth getting. This list comes from the YouTube channel, City Prepping, which put together an excellent rundown of the books worth having when the grid goes dark.

You can watch his video and view the list below.

1. Medical: The Survival Medicine Handbook

If there's one category to get right, it's this one. In a true disaster, when an ambulance might be hours away or not coming at all, solid medical information could be the most valuable thing on your shelf.

The Survival Medicine Handbook by Dr. Joseph Alton and Amy Alton (the couple behind the Doom and Bloom channel) is written specifically for situations where professional help isn't available. It walks you through handling injuries and illnesses when you have to be the end of the line, which is a very different mindset from a normal first-aid guide.

For longer grid-down scenarios, pair it with Where There Is No Dentist. It was written for developing regions without dental care, and anyone who has suffered through a bad toothache knows how quickly that becomes a serious problem with no easy fix.

2. Food Preservation: The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving

Storing food is one thing. Preserving it so it lasts is another skill entirely, and it's one of the first every prepper should learn. The go-to reference here is the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, the long-running canning classic that has sold millions of copies and shows up on nearly every list of recommended food preservation guides. It covers canning, pickling, and preserving in clear, tested steps.

Good supplements in this category include The Prepper's Cookbook by Tess Pennington, which centers on cooking from the kinds of staples you'd have stored away, and Meals in a Jar by Julie Languille, which helps you assemble ready-to-store meals. The key theme across all of them is rotation: you want to actually cook and eat your stored food regularly so nothing goes to waste and you stay familiar with it.

3. Gardening: All New Square Foot Gardening

When your food supply eventually runs low, the ability to grow more becomes priceless. All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew is where most new gardeners are told to start, and for good reason. It's practical, beginner-friendly, and makes efficient use of small spaces, which matters if your growing area is a suburban backyard.

Round it out with a few specialized titles: Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway for a permaculture approach, Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte for companion planting (which plants help each other thrive when grown side by side), and The Forager's Harvest by Samuel Thayer for identifying and collecting wild food when your garden isn't enough.

4. Homesteading: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It

Homesteading is gardening's more ambitious cousin. It's about turning your property, however big or small, into something that can sustain you. The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour is the title that consistently rises to the top. It's a bit more advanced and tends to assume you have some land, but it covers an enormous range of self-reliance skills in depth.

For a more approachable, suburban-friendly starting point, The Backyard Homestead is excellent. If you're keeping animals, The Chicken Whisperer's Guide to Keeping Chickens goes deep on backyard flocks. And the Foxfire series is worth having for its documentation of old-time skills and traditional ways of doing things that were nearly lost.

5. Survival and Prepping: When All Hell Breaks Loose

This is the broad, all-purpose survival category, and two books stand out. When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lundin comes up again and again as one of the most recommended practical survival books, and the SAS Survival Guide by John “Lofty” Wiseman is the compact classic packed with useful field skills. If you could only grab one, the SAS guide is a hard one to beat as a starting point.

Beyond those, this category is deep: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It by James Wesley Rawles, The Prepper's Pocket Guide by Bernie Carr for beginners, Prepper's Long-Term Survival Guide by Jim Cobb, 52 Prepper Projects by David Nash for hands-on learning over a year, and The Survival Mom by Lisa Bedford for getting a household ready.

6. Home Repair: The Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual

We don't often think of a repair manual as survival gear, but consider the reality of a prolonged grid-down situation. Something breaks and there's no handyman to call and no video to watch. You have to fix it yourself. The Reader's Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual is a thorough, updated reference covering repairs and projects throughout the house. It's the kind of book you don't appreciate until the moment you desperately need it.

7. Self-Defense: 100 Deadly Skills

If things go sideways, being able to protect yourself and your family becomes a real concern. 100 Deadly Skills by Clint Emerson, a former Navy SEAL, gets strong reviews and offers practical, memorable techniques worth filing away in the back of your mind.

Pair it with Prepper's Home Defense by Jim Cobb, which approaches the topic from a preparedness angle: how to harden and defend your home if the situation calls for it.

8. Nuclear and Disaster-Specific: Nuclear War Survival Skills

Some threats are severe enough to warrant their own dedicated reference. With nuclear tensions weighing on a lot of minds, having solid information on this specific scenario is reassuring rather than alarmist. Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny is a well-known guide to surviving nuclear fallout, and the official U.S. Armed Forces survival manuals cover the subject from a military standpoint. These are books you hope to never open, but you'd be glad to have if you did.

9. Finances: Financial Peace and Rich Dad Poor Dad

People rarely connect finances with preparedness, but the link is direct: prepping costs money. Gear, food storage, and supplies all add up, and getting your financial house in order is what makes the rest possible. Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey is a strong starting point for learning the basics of getting out of debt and living within your means.

From there, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki reshapes how many readers think about money and assets, and The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone lights a fire under anyone looking to get more aggressive about their goals. (Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant is another eye-opener in the same vein.) Read the ideas, take what's useful, and don't get too hung up on the personalities behind them.

10. The Future: Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

The last category is about zooming out and understanding where the world is heading, drawing on people who spend their careers studying exactly that. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio lays out the big historical cycles that shape economies and nations. (Dalio also has a 43-minute video by the same title that's well worth the time.)

For balance, read it alongside The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan, who sees the coming decades a little differently. And The Sovereign Individual, written back in 1997, is a dry but fascinating look ahead, much of which you can watch playing out in real time. The common thread among all three is simple: the world is changing, and it pays to get ready for it.

Where to Start

That's a lot of books, and you don't need to buy all of them at once. If you're just getting started and want a place to begin, three titles rise above the rest: the SAS Survival Guide, When All Hell Breaks Loose, and The Survival Medicine Handbook. Get those three on your shelf first, then fill in the categories that matter most to your situation.

The bigger point is this. All of the information in these books is easy to get right now, which is exactly why now is the time to get it. Knowledge stored on a shelf doesn't care whether the power is on. Build that library while you still can.

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Family Divided: Politics and Religion

Family Divided: When Did Politics and Religion Start Coming Between Us? I remember a time when Sunday dinner was Sunday dinner. Grandpa might grumble about the news, Aunt Sue might roll her eyes at something on the church bulletin, and then someone would pass the potatoes and life would go on. Nobody left the table. Nobody stopped speaking for a year. These days, it feels different, and I know I’m not the only mother or grandmother who has noticed.

So when did this start? When did politics and religion turn from dinner table topics into dinner table dividers? I don’t think there’s one single answer, but there are several threads worth pulling on, and I want to walk through them with you today, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother.

A quick look back at how families used to handle disagreement

It helps to remember that families have never fully agreed on everything. Grandparents and parents have argued about elections since there were elections to argue about. What kept those disagreements from becoming permanent breaks was structure. Families lived close together. They saw each other every week, sometimes every day. A disagreement on Tuesday got smoothed over by Sunday because there was no way to avoid each other long enough for it to fester. Distance and silence are what turn a disagreement into a rift, and for most of history, families simply didn’t have the luxury of that kind of distance.

The slow build before the breaking point

Family researchers and sociologists point to a gradual shift that picked up real speed in the 2000s and accelerated hard after 2016. It wasn’t one election or one Sunday sermon. It was a slow build of a few things happening at once.

First, we stopped living near each other. Extended families used to share a town, a church pew, a Thanksgiving table every single year almost by default. Now our children and grandchildren are scattered across states, and much of our family contact has moved online, where a stray comment can be read by twenty relatives instead of just the person sitting across from you at the table.

Second, our news sources split apart. Grandma and Grandpa might be watching one channel and the grandkids might be getting their news from a completely different app or a different set of online voices, and by the time everyone sits down together, they aren’t even arguing about the same set of facts anymore. When two people can’t agree on what’s even true, agreeing on what to do about it becomes nearly impossible.

Third, and this one matters more than people give it credit for, our sense of identity got tangled up in our opinions. A political stance or a change in faith practice used to be something a person held. Now it often feels like something a person is. When disagreement feels like a rejection of who someone is, rather than just a difference of opinion, family members dig in harder and forgive more slowly.

Social Media Is Loud

Fourth, social media rewards the loudest, most extreme version of every opinion. Nobody’s feed is showing them the calm, measured middle ground. That means when family members do talk politics or faith, they’re often unconsciously borrowing the sharpest language they saw online instead of speaking the way they would face-to-face over coffee.

Fifth, we lost a lot of our shared community spaces. Fewer people belong to the same civic clubs, churches, and neighborhood groups that used to regularly bring people with different views together for a shared purpose. When the only interaction left is a holiday dinner once or twice a year, there’s no ordinary, low-stakes practice at disagreeing well.

Why religion adds its own layer

Faith differences have always existed in families, but a few newer patterns have made this harder. More adult children are stepping away from the denomination or faith tradition they grew up in than in past generations. For a mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who built her whole life around church community, that can feel like grief, even when nobody meant it as an attack.

At the same time, some families are seeing the opposite: a grown child becomes far more devout or joins a different faith community than the one they were raised in, and that shift can feel just as unsettling to parents who don’t understand the pull.

There’s also the matter of blended families bringing together two very different religious backgrounds under one roof. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it does mean holidays and traditions require more conversation and more compromise than they did when everyone in the family tree shared the same faith by default.

Either direction can leave a mother or father quietly wondering in the kitchen at night where they went wrong. I want to say gently, you probably didn’t go wrong. People grow. Faith journeys are rarely a straight line, and they’re almost never a reflection of a failure in how a child was raised.

The particular pain of political division inside a family

Political disagreement inside a family stings differently than political disagreement with a stranger. You can’t simply walk away from a son or a sister the way you might end a conversation with someone at the grocery store. The relationship has history, obligation, and love tangled up in it, which is exactly why the arguments cut so deep.

Many families are also navigating something new: disagreement not just over policy, but over which sources of information to trust at all. That makes conversations feel less like a debate over ideas and more like a disagreement over reality itself, and that’s exhausting for everyone involved, especially the mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who just wants everyone to get along at Christmas.

What actually helps, from one mother/father to another

I’m not a family therapist or a pastor, so please take this as practical, prepared-mom advice and not professional counsel. If tension in your family runs deep, a licensed family counselor or your own clergy can help far more than a blog post ever will.

That said, here’s what I’ve seen work in my own circle of family and friends.

Keep the relationship bigger than the argument. You can love someone fully and disagree with them fully. Those two things are allowed to sit side by side at the same table.

Set a house rule, not a gag order. Many families do best with a simple understanding that certain topics get a lighter touch at gatherings, not because they don’t matter, but because Grandma’s ninetieth birthday isn’t the venue for a debate.

Ask questions before you respond

Ask questions before you respond. When a grandchild says something that surprises or unsettles you, try asking what led them there before telling them what you think. You’ll learn more, and they will feel heard instead of corrected.

Protect the traditions that aren’t about the argument. Keep baking the same pie. Keep saying the same blessing, or let each person offer their own if that becomes the family’s way forward. Continuity matters more than we realize when everything else feels shaky.

Choose your moment. A serious conversation about faith or politics rarely goes well in the middle of a crowded holiday dinner. If something truly needs to be discussed, a quiet phone call or a one-on-one walk often works far better than an audience.

Watch your own tone before you watch theirs. It’s tempting to focus on how someone else spoke to us, but the fastest way to soften a hard conversation is to notice our own sharpness first and adjust it.

Give it time and give it grace. Some family rifts heal in a season. Some take years. A closed door today isn’t always a closed door forever.

Remember what the relationship is actually for. Family isn’t a debate club. Nobody needs to win. The goal was never agreement; it was always connection.

When healing doesn’t come

I want to say something honest here, because I think too many articles on this subject skip past it. Not every estrangement resolves. Some words, once spoken, leave a mark that doesn’t fade easily, no matter how much time passes. Some family members have hurt each other in ways that were not a simple misunderstanding but real, lasting harm, and pretending that a phone call or a holiday visit can undo that does a disservice to anyone living through it.

If you’re in that position, please know that stepping back from a relationship that continues to hurt you isn’t a failure of love or faith. Forgiveness, when it’s real, happens on its own timeline; sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, and that’s a valid place to land. Forgiveness is also not the same thing as reconciliation. A person can release their own bitterness for their own peace without ever returning to a relationship that isn’t safe or healthy for them.

If distance protects your well-being or your children’s well-being, that distance isn’t a moral failing. Some families do find their way back to each other after a period apart. Others don’t, and both outcomes deserve to be spoken about honestly rather than wrapped in false cheer. Grief over a relationship that may never be repaired is real grief, and it deserves to be honored rather than rushed.

A word for the grandmothers/grandfathers reading this

If you’re the matriarch/patriarch trying to hold a divided family together, please hear this. It’s not your job to make everyone agree. It never was. Your job, the one that actually matters, is to keep the door open and the table set. Agreement is optional. Love doesn’t have to be.

You may be the only person in your family who still talks to everyone. That’s not a small thing. That is a quiet, steady kind of leadership, and it matters more than you know. I also believe some comments or statements made can’t be forgiven. Therefore, we must let go of the stress and live our own lives. That may seem harsh, but some words will never be forgotten.

Does Prepping Mean You Don’t Have Faith

The Final Word

Family will always be made up of different people with different minds, and that’s never been a flaw; it’s always been the design. What’s changed is how loud the disagreements have become and how far apart we have drifted in our daily lives. I believe the families who weather this well are the ones who decide, on purpose, that the relationship matters more than being right, and I believe those who can’t weather it deserve compassion rather than judgment too. May God bless this world, Linda.

Copyright Images: Old Abandoned Church AdobeStock_212120257 by Scott Book

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