Home in two senses
This house covers the physical home, the family you came from, and the conditions of your childhood. It also covers the internal version of the same thing: the baseline you return to, the mood of your own company, what you consider normal because it was normal at eight years old.
Astrologers argue about which parent it describes. The older sources say the father, most modern ones say the mother or the more formative parent, and the honest answer is that it describes whichever parent set the private atmosphere of the house.
The Imum Coeli
The cusp of the fourth is the IC, or Imum Coeli, the lowest point the ecliptic reached at your birth. Like the ascendant, it moves fast, and it is one of the four angles that make a chart specific to a place as well as a moment.
What a planet does down here
Planets in the fourth work in private and often go unnoticed for decades. A fourth house Sun spends a life circling back to home and lineage; a fourth house Saturn usually describes a childhood with more responsibility than was reasonable; a fourth house Moon rarely leaves the emotional weather of the family it came from without deliberate effort.
Endings as well as beginnings
Traditional astrology gives this house the end of matters: old age, the final chapter, what a thing settles into. It is a strange pairing with childhood until you notice that both are periods spent mostly indoors, mostly among family, mostly out of public view.
Against the tenth
Fourth and tenth are the vertical axis of a chart: private against public, roots against reputation. Nearly everyone feels the pull between them at some point, usually as the question of how much of your life the work is allowed to take.
What happens to the fourth house if you move
Relocating a chart keeps every planet exactly where it was and rotates the houses. The fourth house is one of the most noticeable casualties of that rotation, because the IC changes sign for anyone who moves far enough east or west. People who feel differently about home after emigrating are describing something a relocated chart shows plainly.
It is worth saying that this is a change of frame rather than a change of fact. Your birth chart does not stop applying because you moved; the relocated version is read alongside it as a description of how that place asks you to live, not as a replacement.
Questions people ask about this
Which parent does the fourth house describe?
Sources disagree. In practice it describes whichever parent set the private atmosphere of the home, and the tenth describes the more public or demanding one.
Do I need a birth time for this house?
Yes. The IC moves roughly a degree every four minutes, so without an hour there is nothing to fix it to.
Is the fourth house always about property?
It can be, but the core meaning is the private base rather than the deeds to a building.