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(melancholy guitar music)
- We went into the homes of 32 families.
The families all had parents who worked.
Both parents worked outside the home
at least 30 hours a week.
- And we designed an ethno-archaeological component
that really addressed the questions
of how people use their built environments,
how they use space, how they interact
with their material culture, the material worlds
of middle class, dual come families with children.
- Come in.
- I like this chair.
- We systematically documented what people
have in their homes, where they keep it.
- And it was that first day, when I-
I saw he had a camera.
He's taking pictures.
We had tidied up.
When I heard the first cupboard open,
and I went, "Oh, no.
"He's taking pictures of the insides of the cupboards too."
All these little figurines and the napkins and things.
- The archeologist counted every single thing,
in every single space, every single room.
So we have a document of the number of objects
that are in kids rooms, the number of objects
that are in kitchens and living rooms.
It's really fascinating.
- One of the things that we discovered and documented
is that contemporary US households
have more possessions per household
than any society in global history.
Hyperconsumerism is evident in many spaces,
like garages, corners of home offices,
and even sometimes in the corners of living rooms
and bedrooms, and the kitchen,
and the top of the dining room table.
- Shower stalls.
- The shower stalls.
We find lots of stuff.
- [Elinor] Piles
- Piles of stuff.
- Mountains.
- And it's clearly in some of these households
creating some significant stress for the families,
particularly the mothers.
- The finding was that women who looked around their homes
and saw clutter, and remarked on the clutter,
and remarked on the effect of the clutter on their lives,
mainly that it was very,
it was like an ever-present, continuing,
ongoing burden for them to manage,
that those women when we looked at
the cortisol levels of the women,
their cortisol was very high.
- So this is yes, a very crowded bedroom.
All the reading that I haven't gotten done.
- [Elinor] A house could be full of clutter
and nobody cares.
- [Lyn] That's right, that's right.
- It was generally the case, that men,
they didn't even remark on the clutter.
So there's a greater tendency to remark on the clutter
if it bothers you, if you are the one
who's responsible for tidying it up.
- We have lots of stuff.
We have many mechanisms by which we
accumulate possessions in our home.
But we have few rituals or mechanisms or processes
for unloading these objects, for getting rid of them.
- Things come in from all sides.
They really do.
They come in from gifts, and birthday parties,
and holidays, and from relatives, and those kinds of things,
and school, and treasures, as I call them.
I have always been a treasure hoarder.
So a rock, or a branch, or something,
and my kids then ended up that same way.
- There are a lot of forces that encourage us
to consume, and obviously this is
the entire advertising industry, right?
Millions of dollars invested to get us to purchase things.
(melancholy guitar music)
This book is really meant to get us to think about
how we consume objects, to think about
the number and types of toys we consume
and give to our children.
- The United States has 3.1% of the world's children,
but consumes 40% of the world's toys.
- [Elinor] Of course, children in all societies
have something that is similar to toys.
But the sheer quantity of toys is really astonishing
from the cross-cultural point of view,
and how the toys spill out everywhere in the house as well
is also staggering.
- We found in the study that children's toys and objects
were in living rooms.
They were in spare bedrooms.
They were in their own rooms, of course.
They were in kitchens.
They were even in, sometimes, in master bedrooms.
- [Elinor] There's some blurriness
to the idea of a toy, because the parents
have a lot of sentimental involvement
in these toys as parents.
One of the things we soon realized,
is that the toys themselves were toys for the parents
as well as for the children.
The house actually had a kind of
child culture about it as a whole,
where it became a child-centered house.
- Some of it's nostalgia, right?
I mean, Snoopy, he's a cultural icon.
How many children actually recognize Snoopy
in the contemporary.
I think Snoopy's almost an artifact of our childhood.
I think the sheer density and availability,
and fairly inexpensive array of objects
that are out there, this has significantly changed
over the last 50 years.
We've found cheaper ways to produce more stuff.
Because of that, there's more available.
The reality is that we're perhaps spending more
on children's material culture, on toys,
than ever before in the history of humanity.
(upbeat music)
One of the chapters of the book is devoted to
looking at what people have in their pantries,
what they have on the shelves in the garage by way of food,
by way of what we found to be stockpiled food,
and stockpiled household goods.
We walked into some family homes, and we found that
in addition to refrigerators and freezers in the kitchen
being packed full of convenience foods,
the freezer that was in the garage
as part of that secondary refrigerator
which is not uncommon in American family homes,
was also stocked full of these convenience foods.
- If you brought someone from Rome,
or from a town in Sweden, and you showed them
the size of the refrigerator in the kitchen,
and then walked them to the garage,
and they saw the size of the refrigerator in the garage,
they would be pretty astonished.
The refrigerator then becomes something
to think about culturally.
Why do we have these big refrigerators?
What is that saying about food in our society?
- Dual-income families with children
face scheduling challenges that single adults do not,
and that's how do I coordinate shopping trips,
going to the grocery, around school schedules,
around afternoon pickups, around the myriad of obligations
that emerge from coordinating
two or three calendars on a daily basis.
Parents perhaps find that it's easier
to shop maybe only once a week, or once every two weeks.
Fewer shopping trips, bigger shopping trips
when we go do them.
So hitting the big box stores like Costco or Target.
- I think that's true.
We still do go to Costco.
When we're there we'll go,
"Oh, yes, we need 96 granola bars.
"We need them."
- Forty batteries.
- And we still have some of the residue of that.
If I were to walk through my kitchen right now,
you're right, I'd still have a cupboard full of batteries,
even though we don't have that many devices
that need those batteries anymore.
- In addition to this, you would find shelves
in garages and in pantries that would be overflowing
with pallets of bottled water, and juice drinks,
and paper towels, and cleaning products,
multiple versions of the same things.
(upbeat music)
- The reason for having such large refrigerators,
having such large freezers was because
we were putting inside the freezer, especially,
boxed items that were prepackaged convenience foods.
- Chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas, fish sticks,
French fries, things that could be cooked,
that could be prepared from cold to hot
in very little time.
- There are now on average 400 linear feet
of frozen foods available in these big box stores
and these big grocery stores.
This contributes, actually, to the way
that families are consuming their meals.
With so much prepackaged and frozen food available,
we're getting more and more family dinners
that are actually these segmented, independent mini meals.
The kids insist on eating something different,
because they know that mom can fix it easily
with this prepackaged food.
Our data show that only one in six meals
is eaten together by the entire family.
- Families have brought into this idea
that use of these foods will somehow save time
in the preparation of meals, at the end of
otherwise busy and hectic work days, and school days.
In the end, some of the self-researchers found that
families are only shaving off about 12 minutes per meal.
- We started doing something.
We go to a business that provides ingredients
and we "don't cook."
But you package all the ingredients for a particular meal.
This is what your typical dinner would look like.
- Oh, right.
- So you package all the ingredients to make a sauce.
You get the meat.
Then you get the whole, all the cooking instructions.
- That's fantastic.
- You un-freeze it, and then ta da, dinner in a sack.
It's absolutely fabulous.
- That's very good.
- It's certainly a strong pattern.
We saw this recurringly across the 32 families,
not all of them, but many of them.
It really indicates these consumption patterns
that have changed over the last couple of decades.
We want to go to the store fewer times per week.
This is particularly true for middle class families,
with both parents working and with two or more children.
It's a lot of work, shopping with kids.
This is a way to get around that.
But there are very real material consequences.
(upbeat music)
This book is very much a visual ethnography.
We used some 20,000 digital photographs
for 32 families' homes as the basis of the analysis.
We went in and looked for things, for patterns,
and how families were using their homes,
the kinds of things that they imported
into various home spaces.
Kitchens, for example, were these centers
of intensive and frequent activity.
- If you look at the data points
of where family members are every 10 minutes,
you'll see lots and lots of little dots
that are in the kitchen.
That's because the kitchen is used for
almost everything else but-
No, it's used for eating.
But it's also used for a lot of other things.
If there's going to be a clock in the house,
the clock is going to be in the kitchen,
because the kitchen is what Anthony calls
the command center of the house.
- Everything transpires in kitchens.
Activities are organized.
Schedules are coordinated.
Plans are made for the next day.
Meals are cooked.
Kids are doing homework in kitchen spaces.
Very, very intensively used.
A lot of the material culture in kitchens
speaks to this logistical center
of everyday family life.
- I think of the table itself as kind of a touchstone.
It's the place where everyone wants to aggregate,
even when there are wonderful facilities that were
designed for the kids to do their homework, for example,
inevitably they're out at the kitchen table.
That's convenient for the moms too, of course.
They can do child care.
They can multitask with dinner preparation and child care.
- That is our refrigerator, or was our refrigerator.
I mean, I look at these and it just gives me joy
to see this stuff.
Because these were treasures that were very near and dear.
- It's amazing how the refrigerator
is a site of memories and plans.
- Yes, this is memories.
- One of the studies that Jeanne and Anthony did
was look at the family refrigerator door
as a major site of this kind of nostalgia
and sentimentality for the family,
looking at how many different photographs
and other personal things about children's art,
and lots of little things about the family
that went on the door, so much that
you can't even see the door.
The door is just filled with the family culture,
the family history.
- There seems to be a kind of a correlation between
how much stuff is on the refrigerator panel door
and how much stuff is in the broader home.
- There's still, these are notices for dentist appointments,
but those are one timers.
- And these are school things.
- This is all, if your kid's going to be sick,
how do you call in sick,
because I never remember how to do that.
A school calendar for the days.
- And this pizza?
- These are pizza coupons that Luke is now-
Now, look at-
This is going to, this shows stuff gets up here
and it never, ever leaves.
I think the expiration date on these is two years ago.
- We also found some interesting patterns
that emerged in bathrooms.
Bathrooms are where we start the day, right?
So we put on our face.
We put on our clothes.
We look at ourselves.
We check in.
We make sure that everything's there.
We psyche up for the workplace and for school.
They end up being these anticipatory spaces,
where we're anticipating the day to come.
- Not only is our fridge the site of,
but our bathroom mirror has become the schedule center.
Because we have a really big bathroom mirror.
So anything that kids are doing that's important
is taped up there.
Because I won't always open the fridge
first thing in the morning,
but I will always brush my teeth,
and look at myself in the mirror.
- Bathrooms are also perhaps one of the most
contested resources in families' homes.
A lot of the families' homes that we were in
had only one bathroom.
When you have to cycle everyone through that space
within a span of about 30 to 45 minutes
before shuffling everyone off to school and work,
it can be stressful.
You're coordinating opportunities to visit the bathroom.
As a result, we found that there's a lot of sharing,
and family strategies for dealing with
this very finite and limited resources.
Stack multiple people in there.
Because of that, these were interesting sites
of child socialization.
- One of the clear ideals of these parents
is to create a master bedroom environment
that represents a retreat, a spa-like retreat,
from the crazy chaos in the rest of the house.
- This is perhaps one of the least intensively used
rooms in the home.
Not a lot of activities were unfolding in master bedrooms.
But what you might find surprising is that
this, out of all other home spaces,
this was prioritized more frequently
as a space for remodeling.
In 2004, the average cost of creating a master suite
in the greater Los Angeles area,
was about $80,000.
- Their money would have been much better spent
on places that are clear bottlenecks in these homes,
bathrooms that are overly busy during the morning rush,
or kitchens that are often described
by the family members themselves as too small,
too out of date.
- I can think of nothing that more potently
speaks to the significance of this space to parents.
We might even think of the master suite as
a symbolic space.
If they're like my family, you just crash.
You fall asleep because you're tired and you're exhausted.
But you get to wake up in that space.
These are spaces that were made to look more hotel-like,
look more resort-like.
They were intentionally decluttered as well.
This is opportunity for parents to wake up
in a space that looks qualitatively different
than the rest of their home.
For that reason, because of that,
parents might have conferred some kind of
restorative benefits out of this.
This is a place to charge your batteries,
a place of refuge to prepare yourself
before you go back out and face all of the work
that is contemporary American family households and beyond.
(upbeat music)