Today’s families are prisoners of their own clutter

Jessica Pohl of Weston has kids who have largely outgrown their toys, but she can’t give them away. “I’m saving them for my grandchildren.”

By Beth Teitell GLOBE STAFF  JULY 09, 2012
Tell me about it. That sums up Boston parents’ reaction to new research by UCLA-affiliated social scientists concluding that American families are overwhelmed by clutter, too busy to go in their own backyards, rarely eat dinner together even though they claim family meals as a goal, and can’t park their cars in the garage because they’re crammed with non-vehicular stuff.

The team of anthropologists and archeologists spent four years studying 32 middle-class Los Angeles families in their natural habitat — their toy-littered homes — and came to conclusions so grim that the lead researcher used the word “disheartening” to describe the situation we have gotten ourselves
in­to.


At first glance, the just-published, 171-page “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century” looks like a coffee table book. But it contains very real-life photos of pantries, offices, and backyards, and details a generally Zen-free existence. Architectural Digest or Real Simple this is not. Among the findings detailed within:

•PPU The rise of Costco and similar stores has prompted so much stockpiling — you never know when you’ll need 600 Dixie cups or a 50-pound bag of sugar — that three out of four garages are too full to hold cars.

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• Managing the volume of possessions is such a crushing problem in many homes that it elevates levels of stress hormones for mothers.

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Photos: Families battle clutter
Opinion: Pinterest shows craving ‘stuff’ transcends generations

PEven families who invested in outdoor décor and improvements were too busy to go outside and enjoy their new decks.

Most families rely heavily on convenience foods even though all those frozen stir-frys and pot stickers saved them only about 11 minutes per meal.


A refrigerator door cluttered with magnets, calendars, family photos, phone numbers, and sports schedules generally indicates the rest of the home will be in a similarly chaotic state.

The scientists working with UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families studied the dual-income families the same way they would animal subjects. They videotaped the activities of family members, tracked their moves with position-locating devices, and documented their homes, yards, and activities with thousands of photographs. They even took saliva samples to measure stress hormones.

The goal, said Jeanne E. Arnold, lead author and a professor of anthropology at UCLA, was to document what is right in front of us, yet invisible.

“What we have is a time capsule of America,” she said. “No other study has been done like this. Imagine how exciting it would be if we could go back to 1912 and see how people were living in their homes. That’s the core of any society.”

Arnold said she admired the way the families coped with their busy lives, but even so, the $24.95 book (available on Amazon) presents a frightening picture of life in a consumer-driven society, with researchers documenting expensive but virtually unused “master suites,” children who rarely go outside, stacks of clutter, and entire walls devoted to displays of Beanie Babies and other toys.

Arnold said she was bothered most by the lack of time study subjects spent enjoying the outdoors.

“Something like 50 of the 64 parents in our study never stepped outside in the course of about a week,” she said. “When they gave us tours of their house they’d say, ‘Here’s the backyard, I don’t have time to go there.’ They were working a lot at home. Leisure time was spent in front of the TV or at the computer.”

Have you sorted out the clutter in your head yet?

There's not much room in there for anything sensible until you do a thorough Spring Clean of all that shít you keep storing in there like a homeless mad Bag Lady and her overloaded Supermarket trolley.

Call your local council, and the night before the collection put your head out on the Nature Strip for them to mulch in the back of the truck in the morning.

Now you know what it's like to have idiots like you, Karnal, John Smith, and Gregg arrive in threads with the intention of doing nothing more than shìt all over it.

Go on, start another thread.

Another thread, pleased.

I've enjoyed this one.

Unforgiven wrote on Jun 6^th, 2017 at 12:25pm:


Is that like you dabbing your mouth at the table with a clean serviette?

You may now proceed to take the time and make the effort to construct a new thread on a perfectly reasonable topic for discussion. Do some cut-and-paste, and then add some worthy commentary of your own, and then sit back in anticipation that the membership here will pay you the respect of making sensible and relevant contributions for your mutual satisfaction.

(After you've made these efforts in the hope of being taken seriously, myself, Karnal, John Smith, and Gregg will arrive to kick over your sand-castle and flick at your bum with a wet towel ... jolly, no?)

John Smith wrote on Jun 6^th, 2017 at 5:30pm:


Herr Bert's only friends are his mealworms.