SPOILED ROTTEN: Why do kids rule the roost? BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
After last week’s post it’s nice to see I am not alone. I was expecting to see a picture of my house attached to this paragraph: “Children, according to “Life at Home,” are disproportionate generators of clutter: “Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a family’s inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone.” Many of the kids’ rooms pictured are so crowded with clothes and toys, so many of which have been tossed on the floor, that there is no path to the bed. (One little girl’s room contains, by the authors’ count, two hundred and forty-eight dolls, including a hundred and sixty-five Beanie Babies.) The kids’ possessions, not to mention their dioramas and their T-ball trophies, spill out into other rooms, giving the houses what the authors call “a very child-centered look.”
I am going to make a real effort this weekend to get the house in order, starting tomorrow morning. It’s time to lose the crap and experiment with interaction of the human kind. Wish me luck! 😀