4Mountains of Things
JEANNE E. ARNOLD
American families have more material goods per household than any society in history. Even middle-class families with modest incomes have for decades enjoyed the ability to acquire a dizzying variety of inexpensive goods from every corner of the world. During the early 2000s, U.S. incomes were generally robust, unemployment was low, credit was easy to obtain, and persuasive marketing stimulated Americans to accumulate objects at startling rates. These trends characterized much of the later twentieth century as well.
The levels of material affluence that families attain, whatever the culture or status, are most clearly expressed within in the home. This is where people display and use the particular sets of goods they have selected from all those available to them through the primary sources of shopping, gifting, and inheritance. Since the home is the main locus for self-expression through things, it is ironic that while any of us can see the clothes and cars owned by neighbors, coworkers, and strangers when they venture into public spaces, our opportunities to scrutinize and admire the great majority of their possessions are nonexistent unless we happen to be engaged in carpet installation or door-to-door sales.
Tucked behind closed doors in neighborhoods across the country, rooms full of possessions serve as a source of satisfaction to hardworking parents, constantly reaffirming through their very presence in the house the sense that the family has done well. Yet U.S. cultural norms exert incessant pressure to acquire more. Home-design programs on TV and commercial advertisements in glossy magazines show how the respectable home ought to look, with a new spa-like master bathroom or stainless steel kitchen appliances. Through conversations and the rumor mill, parents constantly gauge whether they are keeping up with peers in ongoing materialistic competitions among family and neighbors, typically centering on upscale renovations and the latest vehicles and electronics. The imperative emerging from these material contests is more often than not that the time is ripe to purchase another round of new cars, toys, and television sets.
Significant tension besets middle-class parents who are trying to respond to financial demands coming at them from many directions. On the one hand, they need to meet the basic economic challenges of raising a family, including clothing, educating, and entertaining their growing children; buying a house (or paying the rent); and provisioning themselves with the goods and knowledge to perform competently as parents. All the while, they must keep pace with cultural trends and the frenzied, shop-until-you-drop environment that has prevailed in the United States for decades. By the closing years of the twentieth century, things had ratcheted up to such a fever pitch that being a successful middle-class family entailed substantial purchasing of discretionary and luxury consumer goods and the accompanying dangers of serious indebtedness.
It is fair to say that this material affluence, truly a defining feature of the time, comes at a steep cost, affecting not only the pocketbooks but also the states of mind of American parents. Families routinely succumb to overwhelming pressure to try new fashions and shoes and foods and just-released electronic gadgets, not to mention the latest marketing icons from blockbuster films. Resistance is nearly futile. Witness the frenzy that surrounds the release of a new-concept laptop or gaming console; people actually camp outside stores for hours to be among the first buyers. Advertisers set enormously effective consumer traps for families with young children, pressuring parents primarily through marketing directed at kids to buy a whole new suite of products to replace last year's toys, clothes, and sweets with new styles, new colors, and new brands.1 Ever the dutiful consumers, families respond just as they have been socialized to do, by purchasing enough to trump the neighbors. Heaps of older toys and passé jeans and furnishings are shuttled to closets and basements. It should come as no surprise that after a few short years families amass more than the house can hold.
Economists and consumer historians closely track global production and sales in hundreds of categories of goods, and the data on annual manufacturing volume and the purchasing habits of the U.S. population are widely available. Staggering quarterly profits garnered by retailers make clear to even the most casual observer that millions of U.S. families are buying mountains of things. We can count and measure in various ways the billions of dollars’ worth of goods that go out retailers’ doors. But we have a limited grasp of how America's consumer frenzy plays out in measurable ways family by family and within people's homes. Since the home is the repository for nearly everything families own—that is, if they do not rent an off-site storage facility to absorb excesses—it stands to reason that we must delve into home spaces to document how many possessions households have, the kinds of objects they own (including older goods), where they place them, and how they use them. We also need to be in the home and hear directly from home owners to assess how they are coping emotionally with such material abundance. As simple as it sounds, this kind of systematic documentation of assemblages of goods in ordinary homes has never been recorded for any global industrial or postindustrial society. The material world of Americans at home—perpetually occluded from view—is seriously underexamined.
I led a team of archaeologists setting out to close this gap in our record of middle-class American life by introducing a group of methods focused on documenting material culture within and around the thirty-two homes in the CELF study.2 We systematically assembled data on possessions and their uses within the Los Angeles houses using digital photography, scan sampling, and filming. We collected detailed family commentaries on rooms and objects that shed light on the meanings of possessions for contemporary families through family-narrated video home tours.
The homes of most (but not all) families in our study are strikingly crowded with things. In some, toys and clothes overflow bedroom closets; in others, food is stockpiled in garages and pantries; electronic gadgets are everywhere; and indoor objects spill into backyards. In about half the L.A. households, a clutter crisis results from an imbalance between house size and sheer numbers of artifacts owned. High levels of accumulation swamp bedroom closets and other storage areas, leaving stuff with no (hidden) place to go. Add to this the propensity for youngsters to leave their things strewn around, and we have the perfect recipe for daily cluttering of the house.
Clutter—particularly if it is someone else's—fascinates us. We see impossibly crowded closets or garages of some hapless couple on TV and feel better about our own. Those who try to provide assistance to resolve the problem of clutter or who discuss it as a contemporary phenomenon, however, rarely if ever explicitly define what it is. In the current study, in order to compare households and spaces and people's behavior, we need to portray materiality and clutter in quantitatively meaningful ways such as in terms of the density of possessions in a given space. The numbers of accumulated objects per square foot tell us whether a family is absorbing material goods in numbers consonant with house capacity. In a small house, of course, high densities of objects are reached quickly, and a cluttered look is difficult to avoid. The White House, on the other hand, at 55,000 square feet, or Elvis Presley's Graceland, at 17,552 square feet, would take gargantuan shopping sprees to fill and transform into cluttered spaces.
Density plays a major role in what constitutes clutter, but it is not the whole story. We must recognize two other components, both difficult to quantify and thus largely subjective. These are whether objects are tidily or messily arranged and whether they are visible somewhere other than where they belong. People will always have different thresholds in defining and tolerating clutter in their own homes, but generally speaking we all know clutter when we see it. One thousand neatly arranged DVDs are a model of organization; the same items scattered about on the floor and on tabletops are a visual blight. Some individuals with extreme minimalist taste might even consider one thousand DVDs on a shelf an example of clutter, but everyone will agree on the case of the strewn disks because they are clearly unkempt and out of place. Among the L.A. families, it appears that most households are losing the clutter battle. Fully 75 percent of the families in our study, and across much of Los Angeles, have acquired so much stuff that they have shifted masses of household objects into garages and expelled one or all of their cars onto adjoining driveways and streets.
The consumer one-upsmanship that produces these high densities of goods in homes eats up as much time as it does money. On the work side of the equation, there is an obvious link between the desire to purchase more goods and the need to work more hours (or better-compensated hours) to pay for them. Many parents take second jobs, work overtime, or magnify their stress by extending their lines of credit. Yet the more hours they work, the fewer hours they have available for family time and especially for leisure time. Economists document that Americans have a lengthy history of working more hours per year than adults in other countries.3 U.S. employers provide significantly fewer paid vacation days than in the European Union, for instance, and American workers often do not take all the vacation days available to them.
On the home front, heaps of prized possessions erode family time. Contributing mightily to the leisure deficits of U.S. adults are the great costs in labor and energy needed to manage all the furnishings and goods in a home, including cleaning, organizing, and maintaining them. Working parents certainly have some leisure hours—roughly 15 percent of their time at home—but much of it is experienced in front of the television or computer.4 Not only is parents’ leisure time indoors and sedentary, but it is fragmented into short segments, and mothers enjoy less leisure than fathers. It is striking how elusive outdoor leisure time has become for middle-class parents and children. This phenomenon—so much time spent indoors—is one of the more unfortunate end products of the intertwined elements in this self-perpetuating, complex story featuring escalating consumerism, increasing time spent at work, growing heaps of possessions at home, rising stress, and declining leisure.5
RECORDING LIFE AT HOME
Documenting the Material World
Recording the full, rich spectrum of the material culture inside middle-class Los Angeles houses has been fraught with practical challenges, among them how to cope with the tendency for certain objects to be shifted around the house and how to address the issue of objects tucked away in storage locales (dressers, closets, attics). The primary limiting factor in our documentation process is visibility: in the end, we can record only what we can see in our photographic archive. We photographed just about every square inch of wall and floor space, so in that sense the archive is quite comprehensive. Closet interiors were often but not always captured in photos; dresser contents were not visible. After untold hours of review and coding,6 we are now armed with systematically recorded frequencies of all countable and visible objects in each room of each house, divided into categories such as furniture, media electronics, decoration, lighting, and toys. We provide estimates for aggregated, abundant items such as large collections of CDs or dense piles of toys on the floor. We have still barely tapped this rich data set, but a few examples illustrate what can be done and what we can learn.
Among our first investigations was an enumeration of possessions to illuminate the best means to measure clutter and densities of objects in these homes. At the first home we coded, the Roland-Santos house, the counts exceeded 2,000 visible possessions within just the first three rooms addressed (two bedrooms and the living room). This family purposefully acquired at least 2,260 artifacts—furniture, art, lamps, a book collection, a music collection, toys, decorative objects, photos, and more—and placed them in these rooms somewhere in sight (on a table, cabinet, wall, etc.). This is certainly a robust figure, and in this portion (540 sq. ft.) of the modest house's (980 sq. ft.) cozy rooms, this corresponds to object densities of 4 per square foot. Tallies include all objects on floors, furniture surfaces, and walls as well as on shelves and hangers in open closets, but these counts do not include untold numbers of items tucked into closed dresser drawers, storage boxes, and cabinets or buried under piles of stuff. So our count is clearly a quite conservative measure of actual objects owned. Houses in our study average 1,750 square feet of living space, and many rooms in quite a few of the houses are similarly overstuffed and cluttered. Garages, which serve as the most popular relief valve for possession overflows from the house, are often so crammed with objects that they pose a serious challenge to our ability to arrive at reliable counts (Figure 4.1). The grand totals of possessions from the object-rich Roland-Santos household are clearly above average for the thirty-two-family sample but not by a large margin.
Figure 4.1. Densely packed garages present challenges to the counting and coding of possessions. This is a typical garage with a wide array of household artifacts (tables, bed, couch, chairs, TV, books, art, over forty dolls/toys/games, sports gear, backpacks, sleeping bags, strollers, etc.) and dozens of yard/garden/automotive objects—but no car in sight.
More than sixty parents in our study created self-recorded, videotaped home tour narratives, commenting individually on their home spaces and expressing thoughts about the artifacts these spaces hold. Such narratives are rich in information about the meaningfulness of our homes and possessions and provide a large sample of specific words and phrases that parents use to describe their homes. Analysis of word choices allows us to investigate, among other things, whether clutter and high densities of objects affect parents’ enjoyment of their homes. For example, most mothers comment directly and with annoyance about messiness and clutter, and they typically highlight their central role in trying to keep household mess under control. Words such as chaotic, messy, cramped, and clutter pop up frequently—accompanied by always, constantly, and usually to characterize how often this state of affairs occurs.
But there is a much deeper layer embedded in this story. CELF researchers Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti examined these linguistic data and discovered that a number of parents in the study experience measurable psychological stress associated with clutter and disarray.7 Readings of the stress hormone cortisol, derived from participants’ saliva samples, reveal a measurable physiological link to cluttered home environments. Mothers whose narratives say that the home feels messy, cluttered, or unfinished actually show elevated depressed mood as the day progresses, based on cortisol readings and self-reports. This suggests that living day-to-day in a home that is “stressful” due to ongoing struggles with clutter is a more serious problem than previously thought. The clutter crisis affects some women's long-term health. Mothers who use language indicating that the home is relaxing or pleasant, or who describe their outdoor spaces (and “nature") at some length, experience their home as a more “restorative” environment. These mothers have cortisol readings indicating less stress, and they report better mood during weekday evenings at home. The clear message is that intense consumerism and its primary manifestations—disorganization and a high density of objects and clutter in the home—present challenges to women's well-being. The effect on men's health is ambiguous, and men say little about clutter and mess in their home tours. Many of them appear to simply ignore the problem.
Why is this so? I suspect that the cumulative impact of thousands of visible objects on display in room after room of the high-density cluttered home is much greater than once thought. This is particularly the case where objects are poorly organized. Disorder exacts a psychological toll because it so clearly taxes family labor. Dusting, cleaning, upkeep, repair, straightening, reorganization—all these chores consume parents’ time and energy. Merely anticipating such work almost certainly generates anxiety and stress, and carrying it out is a measurable strain on the household time budget.
Documenting the Rhythm of Activities at Home
Several generations of scholars, albeit with different purposes than ours, have pondered how modern, Western families use their homes. One of the more interesting phases of study began during the 1880s, when home efficiency experts in the United States and northern Europe sought to understand how people used their kitchen facilities—the sink, the stove, the counters—so they could improve the efficiency of kitchen design. An engaging fictionalization of one of these studies is presented in the 2003 Norwegian film Kitchen Stories, which tells the tale of a paid observer who perched in the corner and traced, on paper, the pathways of movement in the kitchen of a Scandinavian bachelor for several months.
Our study of course has a far loftier goal: to capture a detailed record of all family members’ activities in all spaces of the home throughout the day. We want to be able to address many current and future questions about American middle-class families’ utilization of rooms (by gender, by age), uses of objects, frequency of multitasking, and intrafamily interactions. To systematically document complex sets of activities for four or five family members (and guests, if present) in real time, we introduced and adapted methods from other disciplines. Our main method is scan sampling (see Appendix), which has been used by scientists in various kinds of naturalistic observational studies. We conducted our research with a handheld computer in order to record all observations regularly and with precision. Every ten minutes, project ethnographers recorded what each at-home family member was doing, including the person, room or outdoor space, objects in use (computer, bike, cutting board), other people interacting, and secondary activity, if any, such as watching television while eating lunch.
The resulting 16,935 timed observations make it feasible to query the database with an array of complex questions. We can examine across all families or within any given family what fathers, mothers, or children of various ages do, and where they are doing it. We also can assess how much (or little) they are interacting, how much their behaviors vary across weekdays compared to weekends or mornings compared to evenings, and which possessions are most likely to be put to use. Moreover, we can assess important economic questions such as how much time mothers and fathers, respectively, devote to dinners, childcare, chores, and the like, and how much (or little) time they may have left over for leisure at home.
Among the questions we pursue, this chapter discusses findings about the vanishing outdoor leisure of middle-class parents and gender differences among parents in how they spend their limited indoor leisure time. We see a significant departure from the universal suburban ideal that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s that the backyard was a center for “outdoor living,” meant to be used frequently for play and entertaining.8 Families still articulate this ideal when talking about their lives at home, but more than 75 percent do not live this way.9 Instead, the leisure of both parents and children is focused on the indoors, and mothers carve out considerably less free time than do fathers, with the most notable gender-based leisure deficit on weekdays.10 Television, Internet use on computers, reading, and game playing indoors consume most of the open time of American families. Many of our findings regarding families and their time use find solid support when we compare the results from Los Angeles to those from a much larger-scale study on time use among five hundred middle-class families in eight regionally diverse U.S. cities.11
HAPPINESS IS (NOT) AN OVERSTUFFED HOME OFFICE
Our large archives of home tour narratives, videotaped naturalistic family interactions, and photographs of rooms demonstrate clearly that many parents in our study find the thousands of things they have in their homes exhausting to contemplate, organize, clean, and maintain. When family members narrating home tours comment on their possessions as they move through their homes, they frequently voice frustrations over an inability to contain or reduce the clutter that surrounds them. This widely felt frustration in the United States has spurred a whole industry of home organizing, devoted especially to closet organizing systems and garage overhauls. The problem of household clutter has also attracted considerable media attention, and during the 2000-2005 period we witnessed a flood of popular television shows on clutter clearing, home organizing, designing for better storage capacity, and house remodeling and expansion.
Garages and home offices appear anecdotally to be the most objectfilled, impacted spaces in the majority of American middle-class houses, and this is true for most of the families in our study as well. Some children's bedrooms and family rooms are also viable contenders for clutter supremacy among the Los Angeles households. So many goods are flowing through these homes—and often ending up in garages and attics—that only one quarter of garages retain enough room for a car. When we code and count all visible objects in the garages in our sample, we find an average of about 225. This figure is significantly limited by the chaotic arrangement of goods in most garages, which hampers our ability to precisely count boxes, tools, soccer balls, bikes, clothes, cleaning products, furniture, and stockpiled food lurking underneath or behind the visible, counted items.
Plotting in a bar graph all objects that could be spotted and enumerated, we see three distinct peaks, suggesting that these garages fall into three emergent organizational types. Average garage size across the whole L.A. sample is 362 square feet. The very low density, neat garage, represented by five examples in the study, has an average count of 48 objects—including one or two vehicles regularly parked in the space! These garages, which average 340 square feet, contain fewer than 0.14 objects per square foot.
The prototypical garage (nineteen in the L.A. sample) is densely packed and/or chaotic in its distribution of items and averages 190 countable artifacts (range is 125 to 300 objects per garage) in a mean of about 350 square feet. These garages have object densities of roughly 0.5 per square foot. The six exceptionally overstuffed garages in the study are larger than average (mean = 528 sq. ft.) and average 435 visible artifacts (range of 320 to 625). The density is roughly 0.9 objects per square foot, or about six times the density in the tidy garages, and I must emphasize that far more objects are present that we cannot count due to piling and stacking. This is a problem that is exacerbated as object density rises; true densities in some of these garages likely exceed 2 to 3 items per square foot. In these packed and typically disorderly garages, the entire floor space is given over to a more or less solid block of stored or tossed items. Not surprisingly, since garages are now primarily storage loci for possessions that no longer fit in the house, they exhibit a high diversity of objects such as televisions, furniture, holiday items, clothes, boxes of paper documents, file cabinets, art, and food alongside scattered yard and car paraphernalia. Two households no longer have a garage space as such; their garages are now physically converted to bedroom or cabinet-lined computer/recreation room spaces.
Figure 4.2. One corner of a high-density home office space.
Home offices, present in well over half the houses, reveal comparably high—if not higher—densities of objects, which are typically positioned on walls, shelves, desktops, and floor corners since the spaces must accommodate foot traffic. Six of the houses have small home offices (averaging about 60 sq. ft.) in various corners or cubbyholes, and another three families have established two home offices, the second of which is small. One third of the L.A. families have larger home offices, normally full rooms such as former bedrooms and measuring more than twice the size, or 120 square feet (Figure 4.2). Most observers would agree that they are visually stress-inducing rather than “restorative” or restful spaces, and home tour narratives verify that parents experience them this way (see discussion below).
These are spaces where job-related work, schoolwork, or record keeping mixes with recreational uses. Not counting loose papers, magazines, and newspapers, which we treated as ephemera not amenable to accurate counts, the average number of visible objects is 313. Densities in the home office spaces are fairly consistent across the range of room sizes. In the small offices, if we exclude the large music collection in the home office at one household (> 1,600 CDs and 350 vinyl albums), we find a mean number of 137 objects, or 2.3 per square foot. (If we were to include that case, the mean count jumps to 380, and the density rises to a whopping 6.3 objects per square foot. It is clearly an outlier in this sample, but an argument can be made that it is not unusual.) The larger office spaces yield a mean of 257 objects, or 2.1 per square foot. All these figures significantly underrepresent objects actually in home office locations since such spaces are burdened with a complex mix of (uncountable) papers (homework, bills, mail, schoolwork, etc.) as well as dense assemblages of family photos, sports memorabilia, books, binders, videos, computing gear, and furniture. A sense of clutter prevails.
The historian Peter Thornton uses density in a similar way when comparing visually “busy” interior design periods—such as Queen Anne Victorian—to the material signatures of other eras. Victorians filled every available inch of home space with furniture, mirrors, art, decorative items, dark woods, and floral fabrics, the classic high-density look.12 At the other end of the density spectrum, a midcentury modern living room is simple, spare, and often but not always low density. Neat built-in wood shelving units filled with organized sets of books or record albums could transform it into a high-density but still uncluttered space.
Psychologists who study compulsive hoarding behaviors have developed sets of photographs of rooms in successive stages of clutter accumulation to help clinicians gauge the severity of hoarding.13 These sequences of images culminate in extraordinary levels of density and clutter: kitchens or living rooms with stacks of newspapers, boxes, dishes, and clothes towering over a maze of dangerous, twisting paths, the floors totally covered. Such images of course represent pathological behaviors and are far more extreme than the simple shifting clutter situations of ordinary households. But they help to bring these terms and patterns to life. We might think of density as how many objects we see in a space and clutter as (largely) the neatness and arrangement of those objects. Thus higher densities make clutter increasingly and proportionally harder to control, but they do not always go hand in hand.
Turning back to our house inventories, we know from scan sampling data that kitchens and living rooms are the most heavily used spaces in the thirty-two L.A. homes (kitchens on weekdays, living rooms on weekends). Not surprisingly, they also reveal clutter. Whereas kitchen tables and other kitchen surfaces attract mostly shifting panoplies of foods, dishes, photos, schedules, newspapers, mail, backpacks, and the paraphernalia associated with schoolwork and bill-paying tasks, far more is hidden away (and thus uncountable) inside cabinets, pantries, and drawers. Clutter in the kitchen is common, but assemblages of objects are usually transitory. We do not count papers and magazines or the transitory food items and plates that are set out for meals. Thus densities of more or less permanently on-display objects such as magnets and photos on the refrigerator or dish racks, plants, cookbooks, and toasters on the counters are moderate in the kitchen. Counts average about 80, and the mean densities are well under one per square foot. Just seven households maintain more than 100 visible objects in the kitchen.
In family room and living room spaces, on the other hand, large furnishings create entertainment-friendly locales surrounded by a more stable set of decorative objects that reveal a great deal about family taste and identity. Common here are family photos, art, TV sets, game stations, music systems, remote controls, plants, books, DVDs, videos, decorative objects such as ceramics and mementos from travel, and of course toys of many varieties. The average number of visible objects in living rooms is 196, but the range is wide: from 30 to 1,282. The mean density is about 2 per square foot, but a few approach 5 per square foot. Eleven families have both living rooms and family rooms, with the latter adding just over 205 visible artifacts on average to those houses’ assemblages. Although at least two-thirds of living rooms and family rooms are densely packed with goods, those of a handful of the families are far more spartan and tidy, each with well under 100 objects.
What is most important about these sets of numbers is how they translate into family experiences. Clutter demands the energy and attention of the households that are burdened by it. The majority of homes in our thirty-two-family sample harbor high counts of consumer goods and would be classified as cluttered by objective observers (Figure 4.3). A number of parents find the situation personally stressful, as our cortisol data and some of the home tour narratives show. Some parents try to direct their attention away from the mess, accepting that while the kids are young the situation is not going to resolve itself, and the ever-shifting masses of objects just need to be herded occasionally into closets and bins. In their narratives, about half the mothers comment on various concentrations of mess (piles of toys, mounds of books and mail) around the house. While several of these moms temper their frustration and view clutter as inevitable, others are clearly irritated—even bitter—about it.
Karita (mother, school aide) during her home tour:
Figure 4.3. A two-child bedroom displaying clutter and a high density of objects.
This is the office. It's a place that we turned into from part of the garage. It's a total mess. . . . We probably should, you know, organize it better. But it works out well. Here is where the computers are and the kids do homework. We are all on the computers here from time to time. . . . And here we have the garage, with everything. This is usually a total mess, and it's a total mess today again. This is where we have bikes and all the old furniture, sofas, and things that we don't use. It's—how can I say it, it's a mess. It's not fun. It should be cleaned up, and we should probably get rid of a whole bunch of stuff.
Susannah (mother, administrator) during her home tour:
This is the everyday mess I see when I walk into my house. I've chosen to video my house on a day that it's very messy because this is what it looks like every day, so why pretend it's clean. This is the kitchen where I spend a lot of my evenings cooking dinner, feeding the baby. The baby eats pretty much while I cook dinner because she's so impatient to eat dinner. And this is the mess that I have to clean up every day. Probably five, six times a day I am cleaning up after people. So beside my full-time job as a parent, this is my other full-time job in the kitchen. And this is my hang-drying right there. Normally I'd be embarrassed to have anybody over but ... I figured it would be better to have my real everyday life. This dining area is for, as you can see, junk. This is where junk piles up. I won't name names of who leaves junk on the table, but as you can see it's a newspaper. I don't read the newspaper.
A number of fathers in the study seem oblivious or unconcerned and make no comment as they pass untidy areas in their homes. Fathers are more likely to describe cluttered rooms as simply cozy or in need of remodeling or expansion, and they may muse about various artifacts without saying anything about messiness or crowding. But fathers such as Thomas, a marketing director, are exceptions. Showing his master bedroom, he says:
Anyway, suffice to say that we cram an awful lot into this bedroom. In fact about six months ago we repainted and redecorated and took out an amazing amount of stuff. We really quite like it in here except for this area here which is a mess again [points to wife's items on floor]. And here's my little pile on the floor where I throw my day clothes.
Despite parents’ best efforts to maintain order and keep their houses neat, disruptive material elements infiltrate just about every room, led by toys, mail, and paper from school and work. Keys, phones, books, computers, shoes, and newspapers add to the chorus of stuff that is moved around every day and often fails to find a good, out-of-sight resting spot. American families also have multiples of so many categories of possessions such as DVDs, CDs, books, digital games, toys, and magazines that it is inevitable that things are routinely strewn around in an untidy fashion, often leading, we now know, to measurable stress.
Turning to one last space in the public parts of the house, as we examined the kitchens in the study, I identified an interesting parallel between high total numbers of objects in the house as a whole and high counts of objects affixed to refrigerators. The typical American family places quite a few items on the front (and sometimes side) panel of refrigerators. For the 32 L.A. households, the greatest number of items on a single refrigerator is 166, the mean is about 52, and the lowest is 2 (Figure 4.4). Common objects are magnets, snapshots of family and pets, phone numbers, memos, calendars, kids’ art, bills, and menus.14 I assessed how many objects are typically placed there, what kinds of artifacts are considered appropriate, and how these patterns vary across families. Middle-class Angelenos consistently display decorative magnets as well as unframed family snapshots from various informal moments of family history. But we also find a dozen or more kinds of reminders such as school menus, plumbers’ phone numbers, and invitations that are hardly added for their aesthetic value. Many refrigerator postings clearly serve a scheduling and organizing function for the family. Altogether, about 12 percent of households use their refrigerator panels sparingly (9 or fewer items), and these are rather neat by default. Every other kitchen fridge has at least 16 to 20 affixed objects; about 10 percent of these are well-organized spatially, with tidy rows of magnets and snapshots. The rest of the refrigerators have quite high object densities and appear from the outsider's perspective to be palimpsests of randomly placed objects, producing a rather untidy look.
Figure 4.4. A prototypical “refrigerator display” featuring decorative magnets, informal snapshots, phone numbers, schedules, lists, and more.
My analysis suggests that a family's tolerance for a busy, untidy refrigerator surface appears to be a good predictor of a relaxed attitude about high object density and clutter in public rooms of the house: family room, living room, dining room, and office. To examine this phenomenon more closely, we had coders tally everything on the refrigerators, and then I grouped the six households with the highest refrigerator display counts (all with at least 80 artifacts on the panels) and grouped the seven households with the lowest counts (all with fewer than 20 affixed objects). Next, I aggregated the object count data from a set of the main rooms of each of those houses. The rooms I used for this analysis are the living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, and home office. I calculated the average artifact counts for the two groupings. The six houses in the first group (high-density refrigerator display) yield an average aggregate count of 1,448 objects in these rooms. The seven houses in the low-density refrigerator display group have far lower total object counts in these sets of rooms—just 322, on average. By any measure, this is a striking difference, and one consistent with my conjecture that there is a relationship. But I had to explore further whether the first group simply consisted of much larger houses, where we might expect more total objects.
To judge whether house size shaped the results, I turned once more to the density figures. I pulled in house square footage for the two subgroups and found that the houses with the highest raw counts of household artifacts and the visually busy refrigerators are smaller on average (1,336 sq. ft.), not larger, than the latter group (1,744 sq. ft.). This surprising finding means the homes with high-density refrigerator assemblages have exceptionally high household object densities. The houses with tidy refrigerator panels contain lower raw counts of stuff overall, even though they are more spacious. Thus these houses exhibit very low object densities. So there is some support for the idea that a family's tolerance for crowded, artifact-laden refrigerator surfaces mirrors high densities of possessions in the main rooms of the house and that families that keep tidy and minimally decorated refrigerators tend to have more modest assemblages of objects elsewhere in the home.
When we extended the analysis to include all thirty-two households simultaneously and ran simple significance tests, however, we did not identify a statistically significant correlation. This outcome may stem from the very basic approach we have taken to the question to date. We have not yet incorporated other variables that could be relevant, such as the effects of major “spring” cleanings and the number of years families have occupied their current residence. I believe there is an important pattern here, but it must be tested with a larger sample drawn from other middle-class U.S. homes.
It is nonetheless intriguing is that one iconic place in the home—the refrigerator panel—at least in part anticipates overall family tendencies regarding materialism (predilection to buy; intensive consumerism; accumulations over lifetimes) and tidiness and object organization in the house (dense vs. spartan, chaotic vs. orderly). The cases at the two ends of the spectrum (the very spartan and tidy panels and the very high density panels), at the very least, seem to mirror behaviors in the rest of the house. If this idea ultimately finds broader confirmation, we should be able to go to a house and make reasonable projections about the household material assemblage just by documenting characteristics of the refrigerator display.
PERSONAL IDENTITY: THE LABELING OF SPACE
Compared to other historical times and other societies around the world, the extent to which contemporary American household spaces display family members’ personal identity and taste is striking. Given the array of elaborated goods of all imaginable kinds available to purchase, it is no surprise that parents, teens, and even younger children find objects to arrange in their homes that announce, “This is who I am.” Our objects are our biographers. Middle-class Americans typically select two or three main classes of objects as suitable to embody chosen self-identities. One is iconic images or symbols from popular culture with which they feel a strong affinity. This part of our family biography we purchase or inherit. Many kinds of entities are available, including posters of rock stars and sports heroes, Disney motifs, national flags, sports pennants, paintings by prominent artists, and the like. Display of these artifacts in our homes assigns them considerable implicit value: we feel a strong attachment, we admire them, they entertain us, they are part of our heritage, or they reflect core interests and values. Preteens and teens most frequently identify with musicians, film and television stars, and sports heroes, materialized by means of posters on their bedroom walls. Such images are close to universal among the L.A. families.
Another class of objects dominating walls, doors, and desktops in many bedrooms and home offices includes markers of our accomplishments and other paraphernalia trumpeting our existence such as blue ribbons, diplomas, engraved trophies, and commercially made or homemade signs with personal names ("Marcus,” “Giselle") that effectively lay claim to that space. These represent a more overt announcement of the identity of room “owners.” They say, I am an important member of this family, and this is my name and my room! Or, I am a middle-school graduate, a soccer player, a ballet pupil, an Honors student, or a champion dog breeder, and these are my accomplishments. Honors are materialized and projected; space is carved out. Achievement- and name-related artifacts are ubiquitous in the L.A. households. One child's room has no fewer than six name emblems. This seems more prevalent for girls than for boys. Children use these material markers alongside social networks materialized in displays of photos of friends and family to carve out emerging identities and justify control of their own spaces and artifacts. Parents do this, too, in places such as home offices, where they might post a diploma or a photo of themselves with a famous public figure.
And third, family photographs are everywhere, numbering in the triple digits in many Los Angeles homes. Informal snapshots plaster surfaces such as refrigerators and kitchen cabinets, and framed photographs are ubiquitous in living rooms, family rooms, bedrooms, offices, and hallways. Recent family histories are captured in photos that preserve memories of weddings, school days, vacations, and other happy times. Although such displays are both commonplace—averaging 85 photos per household—and highly visible in the U.S. home (sets of photos are almost always visible from the front door), they are not mirrored in the homes of the Swedish and Italian families studied by our sister research centers. A few formal photos of family ancestors may be present in the typical Roman home, but displays do not spread throughout the house or extend to other object types. This pattern is distinctively American.
Although it seems grounded in recent consumerism as much as anything, the personalization phenomenon actually has deep historical roots. Clifford Clark's analysis of American homes shows that even the earliest emergence of suburbia during the late 1800s was framed by a set of new expectations about what the American house should be.15 The thinking was that houses for the middle-class family must become far more than simply shelters or places of refuge. The house needed to support and nurture the family and encourage “the growth of each family member's talents, capabilities, and health” moreover, it was expected to enhance “individual self-expression and creativity.”16
As if wives and mothers were not burdened enough with child-raising and house upkeep, they were also then saddled with the responsibility of developing an attractive home design that announced who they were to neighbors and visitors. The house was strongly identified as the women's sphere as early as 1880—and artistic and musical activities and training of children in the arts were expected to take place there—and it was particularly true starting in the 1900s that women needed to imbue the house interior with things that creatively conveyed family tastes and personal identities. The house became a place for artistic expression and the projection of family ideals through the careful selection of furnishings, china sets, front porch decorations, paintings, and the like. The house form itself—both the style (Queen Anne, bungalow, colonial, Greek revival) and the room layout—was also considered an embodiment of personal expression, materially reflecting the owner's ideas about family, comfort, and social standing.
Such strong encouragement to express individuality naturally led to a rather competitive approach to home furnishing and upkeep. Although people sought a distinctive look for their own homes, most yearned more than anything to conform with the highest-ranking arbiters of taste in the neighborhood, those most well-off or admired. Widespread emulation in turn led to much duplication of house styles and furnishings. Strong tensions arose between imitation and creativity in the home.
Social critics of the early 1900s labeled the increasingly prevalent middle-class need to show off the home and possessions a form of exhibitionism.17 This thrust toward personal, individualistic display of objects has persisted unabated in the American ethos for more than 120 years, and the zeal to personalize home spaces is clearly still with us.
Considering the house as an instrument of display, a “museum” for preserving family memories and histories, and an arena of self-expression helps to frame our understanding of the intense personalization evident in American homes. Specific places such as the fireplace mantel and the front parlor or foyer have evolved into standard locations for family photos, art objects, and sophisticated or expensive artifacts suggesting worldliness. As early as 1880, material possessions became signs of refinement, achievement, and status, and thus the home became the place for family display.18 Since we could hardly carry all these things around, we brought people to see them in our homes.
The pressure to decorate escalated significantly with the birth of advertising in magazines and newspapers in the 1880s, creating a culture of consumption fully accessible to the common woman and man. Values shaped by media depictions of house-decorating ideals contributed significantly to what people wanted. Commodities multiplied, and women were encouraged to furnish their homes with everything new. The emergence of glittering, fantastic, museum-like department stores with sumptuous choices (Macy's, Marshall Field's) was seductive,19 and it placed Americans of modest to substantial means on a path of consumer frenzy from which we have rarely swayed. It was not long afterward that Thorstein Veblen made his renowned, scornful comments about conspicuous consumption and waste in American society.20 So the house as an unusually expansive canvas of personal expression is a true American legacy, materialized by as many dazzling and identity-projecting possessions as can be afforded.21
Intergenerational transitions—the ways in which each new generation of householders perpetuates this legacy—are underexamined in studies of material culture and modern life. Little is known about the process by which young couples, who have been socialized by the distinct family traditions of their respective childhood homes, may struggle to articulate what they identify with as they create new material surroundings. Couples must negotiate and ultimately develop a strategy to furnish and personalize their home as they build inventories of goods through purchases and inheritance. In cultures with deeper and stronger material heritage (Italy, for example), young couples might inherit a few valued heirlooms around which to build the new household. Twenty-first-century American couples are more likely to purchase their new household identities at Ikea and Target.
Among the families in our sample, a few decorating choices appear nearly universal, and these cases tell us something important about U.S. culture. Nothing puts the stamp of “this is ours” on a home and celebrates the unity of the family more than depictions of the family itself, and almost all the thirty-two Los Angeles families make a strong effort to portray family history through the display of photographs in multiple rooms of the home. While numbers of visible photos of family members (and pets) vary from as few as 10 to as many as 210, most families display at least 70 person-centered photos, and the average per household is a robust 85 (Figure 4.5). Some families maintain veritable shrines of family member images.
Photos range from formal (weddings, annual school pictures) to casual snapshots from family vacations, and they may be found in living rooms (often on mantels, walls, and special tables), hallways, bedrooms, kitchens, home offices, and even garages and bathrooms. Favorite locations for informal, unframed snapshots are the children's bedrooms and the refrigerator. On average, families include about 9 or 10 photos among the many items they attach to the refrigerator door. Framed photos and images from formal occasions like studio portraits or weddings usually are matched to spaces that are the most formal in the house (e.g., living rooms) and rest on the nicest tables or mantels. Middle-class families clearly share certain values regarding the appropriate placement of photos and the formality of framing.
Figure 4.5. A living room wall featuring family photos in a highly visible locus immediately inside the front door. These are part of a large assemblage of photographs of family members located throughout the house.
Also on display in 97 percent of the homes are diplomas, certificates, awards, trophies, and other insignia of personal accomplishments of the children. We see less emphasis on markers of personal accomplishment among parents (found in about one quarter of the homes). But quite a few sets of parents in the study strongly identify with a specific cultural group, ethnicity, religion, or sexual identity, and they make an effort to display one or more important material markers in the home that signal their membership in or affiliations with those groups. These can be of fundamental importance to family self-identity. A Swedish-born mom displays a Swedish flag over the front door and has a large framed painting of a seascape from Sweden in her living room. Japanese American parents show off delicate decorative figurines from Japan in a living room display case. One of the two-father families in our study has rainbow artwork and other art pieces that celebrate the gay rights movement.
Another way in which American families commonly express identity and announce their values and interests is through the display of school and professional sports teams logos. Allegiance to teams takes the form of pennants, caps, and other items. In our study, the storied franchises of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and the Dodgers baseball team, represented by flags, foam fingers, posters, and helmets (about 18 percent of households), clearly predominate over lesser franchises and more distant teams. These are important ways that families announce their support and participation as members of a locally significant community.
Beyond these materializations that help to express in very central ways who the families are, we see their attempts to reveal a sense of style, cultural refinement, or “taste.” Families adopt aesthetic preferences pertaining to certain styles of furniture, paint colors, and art from formative life experiences (parents, college friends, neighbors, high-end hotels) or overt emulation of cultural icons (the rich and famous). However, most young middle-class families with limited means are more likely to acquire furniture and framed posters from big-box stores than gilded bath fixtures and original paintings like the ones their cultural heroes have. Emulation can go only so far. There is also the issue of a new household needing to blend and accommodate the disparate tastes of the couple. The results in middle-class U.S. homes are, as we would expect, not always coherent. Mixed styles, little formal art, vacation mementos, knickknacks, and clutter are more prevalent than clean, recognizable furnishing styles.
Some homes in our study are dominated by juvenile iconography, including large, framed Disney icons in living room spaces. Others eschew Disney art but cannot wrestle free of children's materials in every room of the house. To say the least, it is challenging to have a stylish living room with blankets, Barbies, and Legos all over the tables and floor. Some families buy low-end furniture that can handle spills and tears until children get a bit older. Investments in stylistic expression may be thoughtfully postponed until the family gets farther along in the life cycle.
THE DECLINE OF OUTDOOR LEISURE
The home also exhibits clear material residues of busy families’ vanishing leisure time. With so much of life focused on jobs and school activities, parents often convert areas such as bedrooms and corners of garages into home offices. Formal, dedicated office spaces and computer rooms (found in eighteen of the thirty-two households in our sample) are common, and almost every house has multiple computers and multiple desktops covered with work-related materials that take space from other home activities. And while families devote considerable money, effort, and sentiment to beautifying their front and back yards, they are rarely observed spending time in these leisure-oriented spaces. For example, Karita (mother) reported during her home tour:22
I'm going to go outside now to the backyard. This is the outside patio. We sometimes eat here and things like that. We have a nice fireplace and barbecue, so we can, you know, use that. It's a big yard. We did get gardeners about two years ago because it took way too much time to do the yard. We were never home . . . doing baseball and Softball every weekend. So we felt the yard started to kind of look kind of bad so ... We have lots of side space, and again, it could be used better. It's more just putting stuff there that we don't use, I guess. I finally cleaned up a few days ago. We have this big pool, but we don't use it anymore, so I would like to get rid of it.
When we recorded how everyone spends time at home, we found that parents have moderate amounts of leisure—about 15 percent of their time at home. But virtually all their leisure moments happen inside, they occur in fragmented episodes, and they are most often associated with television watching (50 percent), followed by reading (21 percent) and playing games or playing with kids (18 percent).23 Certain families prove to be exceptions to these trends, but even for them leisure at home is mainly devoted to sedentary indoor activities. Frequent interruptions arise from children, cell phones, and the need to attend to household chores.
Important gender differences exist as well. Mothers have less leisure time overall (roughly 13 percent of time at home), and the average duration of their leisure episodes is about ten to twenty minutes. Looking at all the mothers collectively, only 2 percent (one in fifty) of their leisure events lasted more than one hour. Fathers do better, enjoying an average of 21 percent of their time at home in leisure, and the episodes are slightly more likely to last longer: collectively, 5 percent (one in twenty) represents more than one hour. Leisure time experiences vary by gender across hours of the day as well. During busy meal preparation and cleanup time blocks, from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M., mothers have notably less leisure than their spouses. Mothers do chores or tasks on average 94 percent of the time between these hours (6 percent leisure), whereas fathers typically manage to enjoy leisure for about 18 percent of this time span.24 The disparity lessens in the 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. block, but mothers are still investing more time in nonleisure tasks (mothers spend 86 percent of this time span doing chores; fathers, 81 percent).
One of the most striking discoveries of our study is the inability of busy L.A. parents to find time for outdoor leisure. Less than 3 percent of parents’ hours at the house are enjoyed in leisure activities in their backyards. Fully three-fourths of parents have no outdoor leisure moments at all during a typical week (including weekends), and 58 percent of families—children included—spend no time in these spaces, for fun or even for yard work.25 The children in just one-fourth of the families used their backyards for leisure activities one or more hours during the recording period. These minuscule usages of outdoor spaces occur despite the draws provided by southern California's famously good weather and the families’ significant investments in their backyards in the form of swimming pools, slides, play sets, baseball cages, trampolines, skateboard ramps, large expanses of grass, brick fireplaces, barbecues, patios, decks, outdoor dining sets, lounge chairs, and hot tubs. Parents’ and children's home tour narrations for a good number of the study households verify these minimal uses of outdoor spaces as the family norm.
CONCLUSION
This chapter describes the consequences of the sheer numbers of possessions American families have in their homes. We can see that many parents point with pride during their home tours to objects of special meaning and value in their homes, including art, heirloom furniture, and artifacts from their travels or their home countries. Attachments to material culture are a nearly universal fixture of our modern cultural heritage and can give us pleasure and a strong sense of our family's history. Most furnishings and decorations in the study sample appear newer and may be valued simply for their monetary value, whereas others may be largely sentimental and related to family connections (children's art, grandma's sewing machine, an old wedding dress). Regardless, their importance to most people makes it clear that possessions have a powerful impact on our general well-being. Behavioral archaeologists have long understood this deep connection between people and their material culture.26
But taken to an extreme, great mountains of things in our homes cost us considerable money, drain our labor and energy, and detract from the attractiveness of our homes. For some adults, women more than men, persistent clutter exacts a psychological toll and causes unhealthful stress. The mania to accumulate prized goods prompts us to work harder, take less vacation time, enjoy less leisure at home, and savor startlingly little leisure outdoors. Many families in Los Angeles, as well as across much of the United States, take part in an unremitting work-and-spend cycle, engaging in competitive purchasing and spending fragmented leisure time in sedentary indoor pursuits. Still, as other chapters in this book reveal, many of these families absorb or deflect experiences of time stress, material abundance, and other pressures in ways that allow them to enjoy happy, energetic daily lives. Ultimately, the tale of the middle-class family at the opening of the twenty-first century is a story of remarkable resiliency.
NOTES
1. Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood. DVD. Media Education Foundation, 2008.
2. The archaeology/material culture researchers are Jeanne Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Margaret Beck, and Angela Orlando. See Appendix for a more detailed description of methods.
3. Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006.
4. Beck and Arnold 2009.
5. Schor 2004; Whybrow 2005.
6. When we set out to document the material culture of modern middleclass Los Angeles, we designed procedures that allowed us to count and classify the visible objects in each room of each house. Because so many objects are present, this proved a monumental task. Undaunted, our trained coders spent more than a thousand hours carrying out this project using our large digital photo archive. Coders assign every photographed object to an overarching category (e.g., furniture, media electronic, decorative item, lighting, toy) and then directly count (for most categories) or estimate (for abundant or piled items) the number of such items present, room by room.
7. Saxbe and Repetti 2010.
8. Clark 1986, 179.
9. Arnold and Lang 2007.
10. Beck and Arnold 2009.
11. This study included five cities in the Midwest, one in the Northeast, one in the Southeast, and one on the West Coast. Suburban, urban, and rural localities are represented. The 500-family study was conducted by the Sloan Center at the University of Chicago, and the comparative analysis was done by members of the Chicago and UCLA Sloan Centers (Broege et al. 2007).
12. Thornton 1984.
13. Tolin, Frost, and Steketee 2007.
14. Objects affixed to refrigerator panels comprise these categories, in descending order of frequency: Magnets, Photos, Magnetic Photo Frames, Children's Artwork, Calendars, Assorted Papers, Children's Schoolwork, Achievement Awards, Emergency Contact Numbers, School Notices, School Menus, Schedules, Lists, Magnetic Bins, Coupons, Receipts, Save-The-Date, Magazine/Newspaper Cutouts, Post-Its, Business Cards, Holiday Cards, Invitations, Postcards, Rosters, White Boards, and Charts.
15. Clark 1986.
16. Ibid., 102.
17. Ibid., 112.
18. Ibid., 120.
19. Belk 2001.
20. Veblen 1899.
21. The visual record of home lives of the 32 Los Angeles families is provided in the book Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors (Arnold et al. 2012).
22. This family did not use its 3,600-square-foot backyard space (with pool, batting cage, brick BBQ, tiled patio, and dining set) at all during the study.
23. Beck and Arnold 2009.
24. Ibid.
25. Arnold and Lang 2007.
26. Schiffer and Miller 1999.