DD recently had a major meltdown out of nowhere where it came out that she was extremely upset with me for recycling her graded schoolwork. I have always done this in her full view and never thrown away things like writing assignments or long-term projects--just your basic math and spelling worksheets. It turns out that she wants to keep these, or at least have the right to keep them. She also is upset that we have in the past thrown out some of the vast quantity of artwork she produces, with or without (I admit, sometimes it is without, for little stuff) her permission. She says she wants to keep these things "because they have memories," btw.

She has always had a tendency to want to keep everything...just...everything. I know this is not uncommon for kids. Okay, I try to accommodate to some extent--her room is farrrrr more full of random stuff than I would like and her desk is stuffed full of papers--- but clutter makes me crazy and we have quite a small home. Also, beyond that, I wonder how much of this is a manifestation of anxiety, perfectionism, etc. Both DH and his mother have a lot of trouble dealing with "stuff" and paper and tend to pile, keep everything, never sort, etc. I feel like this can be a kind of paralysis that can really be quite serious.

Thoughts? The Lego thread going now makes me think this is not at all uncommon here. BTW, we have also had the Lego issue. My kids are allowed to keep one creation "out" at a time and the rest we take photos of.

I have the same problem with my daughter and husband. It drives me nuts, but I eventually give in. My husband wants to keep all of our daughter's toys and work as well as his own.

I have no advice - and am actually looking for some.

I have the same problem, and like your DH, I have a problem myself, too. Our house is packed full of crap. I will be looking for any solutions anyone has here, but I have to say I'm not hopeful.

This isn't a problem in our house. Our DD has tried to hoard in the past, but we've usually managed to clean things up without an overwhelming amount of conflict. Usually the conversation is that we need to get rid of these things to make room for new things, and after a while, she sees our point of view, and even becomes helpful. We've been through this more than once in her playroom, and after she gets rid of the toys she doesn't need, she quite appreciates how she has more room to play.

If this were to be a bigger issue, we'd employ our normal philosophy of "here are some boundaries, within those, go nuts." So in this case, we'd give her a bin that fits in her closet, and tell her that's for all her papers, she can decide which ones go, and which ones stay. And then, as papers start stacking up in random places again, we'd let her know that she needs to deal with those by a certain time/date, anything we find left out after that is going in the trash.

Some of us are clutter people, I can't thinks too straight without stuffs all around. Not a problem, except, sometimes one needs to walk and not show up on some reality TV show as a before picture. I think people with neat desks will never understand those of us with messy ones any more than extraverts will ever understand introverts.

I use reminiscing while sorting to sort must haves, like to keeps, and mostly indifferent to stacks when moving or purging. I'd suggest talking through a similar system with her. Maybe special boxes for the "best of" keepers. And keep a trashcan/recycling box handy, at least from my experience if I keep the "whatevers" I'll have to review them again before they go away.

This is your middle school dd, right? I wonder if part of the reason this is coming up now as an issue and hadn't happened in the past is that she's going through a phase of growing independence or something like that related to her age? If she is, it might be a phase she gets past. I do think it's a reasonable request on her part to want some control and choice over what is and isn't saved, so maybe you could take this as an opportunity to decide together what to save, how to decide what to save (is it all up to her, do you have some say etc), and *where* to save it (I think it's totally reasonable that it all be saved in HER room lol, and that she not be allowed to have her room grow to be a candidate for a TLC show :D).

One idea for her schoolwork (if she really wants to keep it all) is to invest in an inexpensive (I know, that's a relative term!) scanner and let her scan her work in and save it in a folder on a thumb drive or on a computer etc. And then toss the paper! I add that "and then" in because I can see my hoarding-tendency-dd scanning and still wanting to keep the paper somewhere.

polarbear

I was like this as a child, and I now have sentimental DS10 who weeps if you throw things out. I view the hoarding impulse as an anxiety behavior.

We have "throwing out" practice, actually, where we make choices together about what to keep and how to store what is kept. It has to be in his room (not mine...), and it can't be spread all over the floor. This takes a lot of 1:1 coaching and support, but has gotten better over time.

DeeDee

I really like the scanner idea!!!! We may have to try that for DD7 who wants to keep all her school work.

We have told both our girls that if you get a new toy you have to get rid of a toy and if it is a new stuffed animal they want to get then they have to get rid of 2 or more (depending on size)from the hoard they have at home. That helps some, but more often than not, they try to pick some little toy they got as a birthday party favor or from a Happy Meal to get rid of, so we have to set stricter guidelines.

I'm so glad our family is not the only family with this problem - whether it is the child or the parent (or some of both).

I admit I sometimes have a hard time throwing things away that I feel I may use or need at a later date. Some of these things are legitimate items and others are probably worthless, but you never know. DH is the one that can throw things out without batting an eye.

Cheap pictures and storage is solving this issue for us. We don't even have a scanner now; I just take pictures with my phone. (This works great for most art and big writing; I'm hoping by the time we get to smaller writing she 'll be typing important stuff or keeping random poetry in a nice journal anyway). It's still a hard choice sometimes as I'm cleaning but a great pressure valve I keep more than enough and will have to purge, but tg for iPhones and excessive GBs of storage!

Thanks for the thoughts. BTW, she is 9, not in middle school yet. One issue that came out was that she was upset about things we had gone through and sorted together (I thought!) on a recent room purge. She expressed happiness about how the room looked at the time, but apparently felt regret afterwards, missing the items we had thrown out. I have no idea how to handle that because we did do it quite collaboratively. I guess she felt pressured--she knows I like to get rid of clutter. I am a neat desk person, by the way. I prefer my desk surface empty, actually (maybe one or two small stacks).

I do think I will buy her a storage bin and allow her to manage the papers more herself. She has room for this in her room now. I suppose I just wonder how far to allow this. I truly feel it's a problem for DH and my MIL. We have done the photo thing a lot with building creations. She never asks to see the pictures, interestingly.

The picture is just a transitional help that lets her let go. She's probably not attached to all those objects and papers; she's "just" experiencing anxiety about the permanence of getting rid of them.

FWIW, I have trained myself to be good at throwing things out. It's a skill that can be learned.

DeeDee

I am a "keeper" myself (not quite up to hoarding status), and DH spent 22 years living out of footlockers and doesn't think anything should be kept, so it gets interesting at our house. Both kids are cluttermonsters as well.

I was only able to get rid of certain clothes (outgrown by DD6) last week by taking pictures of them for posterity -- most of it she was willing to put in the donations bag, but some were sticking points. I will note that the same strategy worked for me when I managed to allow myself to get rid of some toys that I had had since I was a toddler -- worn, ratty stuffed animals full of love who went into the trash after having their pictures taken.

We keep boxes in the closet, one for each child, which are for the "save" papers and artwork, but most ordinary assignment papers get tossed. I tend to do that when they aren't looking, and they never ask. Sometimes DD will catch me tossing one that she wants to keep, but she doesn't fuss too much when I explain that all the special ones went in her box.

Toys, miscellaneous junk, all that stuff tends to build up alarmingly between cleanings.

I "hoard". I have kept everything my son has ever drawn, worn, touched. I have everything packed in storage containers. For a long time, we tried to have another baby so I thought our eldest was going to be our only child. However, now we have our second, I am the same with his stuff LOL.

My babies will never be these ages again; they will never draw, make, or wear these things again.

Oh my.

Although I'm no Felix Unger, I do like the kids' rooms to be reasonably neat & tidy. Basically, everything off the floor and off the bed... and put away properly.

Where I start to lose it, though, is when a child accumulates buckets of poo, which are essentially the result of a lazy clean-up effort. Finding one of these containers filled with a jumbled mess of clothing, books, toys, etc. just drives me to distraction.

My solution? A few days visiting the grandparents for both kids. I stay home and get out the bull-dozer.

To be somewhat fair, however, I will toss everything into a large "Purgatory Box" which will be held for a month or so. If the child can name a specific missing thing, I will pull it out. Otherwise, the box goes to the thrift store.

Anytime I find myself losing my resolve, I just watch an episode or two of Extreme Hoarding on Netflix. Never fails to get me all fired up again.

I am not sure if I could have started this as effectively later in life, but when my most hoarding inclined child was small (3-5) I gave her the choice of helping/watching me clean out her room or letting me do it. Either way everything i removed would go into the shed for x amount of time and she could ask for it back. She quickly learned she couldn't bear to watch and let me go for it. And she's never asked for anything back. Now at 11 she both retains less precious paper to start off with and is learning to toss stuff when her room needs a big overhaul...

I'm lucky that my eldest, who is also inclined to also hold onto everything, is a neat freak and always has been. Lots of cupboards makes for a tidy room and house. And when they're full, that's what the shed is for!

This is us. DD10 and myself are both pseudo-almost-hoarders. My poor DH hates it but has resigned himself.

I put things in storage and periodically look through them to see if I can get rid of some of it. Usually the longer I've kept something the more likely I am to let it go. It's funny because I'll look at an item and think "omg why am I keeping this?" at the same time that I'm remembering that six months ago I HAD to keep it.

Most of our house is pretty normal, but cluttered. My office is chaos, lol.

My daughter's room is... well... awful. (It's clean - I have a VERY strict no food, drinks or pets rule, but it's just crammed with stuff.) We're working at it slowly and there has been progress. Just when I'm feeling optimistic about it, I'll visit a friend and see a "typical" child's room - tidy, minimal stuff, etc., and I start feeling overwhelmed again, lol!

Squishys I can completely relate to your statement: "My babies will never be these ages again; they will never draw, make, or wear these things again." It's so true. I tell myself that I can get rid of some of it, though, and I'm not losing them with the stuff. It's hard though. I know how you feel

DD is particularly strange about her clothes. She wants to keep every article of clothing she's ever worn. I want to hand some stuff down to her cousins, but I can't get her to part with it. If I do it behind her back and she sees her cousins wearing something she used to own, the damage to her trust in me would be massive. So instead I talk with her and reason with her and she'll eventually part with one or two things. There's progress, but it's painstakingly slow.

An upside is that she's made fantastic progress with packaging (from toys, & whatever is new that came packaged). She used to obsessively want to keep every scrap of packing that came with stuff (O.M.G.). Now she's very comfortable about handing most of it (not all) over to me for recycling. Yay....

We've done the bin thing, and it is awesome! I told DD5 that she was free to keep anything she liked, but when it wouldn't close anymore, she would have to make some choices. The funniest thing is watching her review old stuff and saying, "WHY oh WHY did i ever think this old thing was important?!" before she tosses it blithely into recycling. Good luck!!

I can relate to your DH - I'm like that some times too! Some times the girls will put something in the "get rid of" pile that I really cherish and they obviously don't feel the same connection.

Once we did a purge of stuffed animals and they both wanted to get rid of the Build-A-Bear animal they "lovingly" made that cost probably $30-$40, but wanted to keep some junky creature they got out of a machine at an arcade.

Well, mommy can have a bin, too...

Sadly, I probably need more than one! I can admit I have this issue (as well as many others) and I'm working on it...lol!!!

I guess? When I thought about it, I realized that she does actually look at her old notebooks and workbooks from K, 1 and 2. I know she does because I see them taken out. She also looks at Valentines (see, I'm not so bad--I have let her keep all her valentines every year, from preschool on!) and old cards. So, some of it she does look at. The building creations may be different because they aren't associated with a relationship? It's funny because the child has a memory of an elephant...she remembers her pre-K classmates perfectly already...

This is just another example of a way in which DD and I really differ. I really get wanting to keep special projects, letters from friends, but I cannot understand keeping a fractions worksheet. It doesn't help, I think, that this is a sore spot with DH and I about HIS stuff. (HIs thing is usually, "I might need it someday." He isn't sentimental. It's about...what if?) And I live in fear of the day we have to clean out his mother's house...

I'm guilty of this, too, and I'd totally let go of it except that there have been too many times where I'd been right. Besides, there's something hormonally rewarding about cannibalizing otherwise worthless junk, repurposing other things, and solving a complex problem for free. Improvise, adapt, overcome.... oooh rahhh!

But yeah, every once in a while, it is necessary to look through that junk again, because clearly some of those things that get saved end up obsolete. I'm pretty sure I won't need those extra phone cords anymore... but then again, they'd do as a pretty strong rope in a pinch...

Dude you crack me up. We moved house something like 10 times with DHs crates of precious cables, including two lightbulbs on the end of extension cords. And every time I tried to ditch them he would say "But we'll need them one day..." and sure enough we moved into a house with an under house storage area - no floor, just dirt, no lights, but a power point. And DH had light in there while the removalists were still moving boxes around... And a very smug expression on his face... He has managed to part with some truly ancient tech in recent years...

Cool....removalists...we say movers...I like removalists so much better and am going to start using that.

I just throw the stuff out when she is not home. I keep a folder of the past 3 months of stuff, which always appears full. One day she might figure it out, hopefully she won't care as much by then. I also throw away toys and small stuff without her permission or knowledge. She hasn't missed anything yet. I just can't let her collect at the pace she would like or we would be on a reality tv series by now. I do keep really special stuff (either special to her or to me). I put that stuff in a storage box in the basement.

Kelly, just FTR, that is what I used to do with some things. But DD had been seeing stuff in the recycling and had caught on that things disappeared. She was holding on to a HUGE amount of anger and resentment about this, as it turns out--she felt disrepected and belittled by it but for whatever reason did not say anything for a long time. I don't know how old your DD is or whether she is likely to feel this way, but I now feel bad about the fact that I was still throwing some things out without her knowledge. I also thought she didn't miss the items. DD is an unusual child with a massive memory, but then, we are on this board, so.

Try Artsonia.com for artwork. You can put everything out there for free and also share it with far away relatives. They have an app where you can upload photos of all the artwork.

If hoarding is an anxiety-based behavior, I don't see how secretly throwing things out is likely to help. You're going to get caught eventually.

Yes, that's my point. I mean, there is probably a threshold, and some things really will never be noticed, but it's unlikely that you won't eventually get busted.

DD did her first sort of schoolwork the other day. She kept about a third of two weeks of work. Gulp. I saw some logic to her choices, but this won't be sustainable for long. At least, to me it doesn't seem that way. I've been having this discussion with other parents and am amazed by the number who do say, "Oh, I keep everything." EVERYTHING??

then maybe giving her a box with a lid (that must be pruned when too full to hold more) might be your magic bullet? that way, she gets full control, you don't have to think about it anymore and there's a physical limit to how much hangs around? if she stuggles to make choices when the time comes, you can gently help her through by suggesting she sort things into piles of must-keeps, nice-to-haves and why-did-this-thing-ever-matter-to-mes...

also - it might be productive to chat with her teachers about this issue. they might be wiling to positively reinforce any choice-making she does at school? they might even help her do a pre-sort at school - develop criteria for what's valuable to her (not them! or you!) that might make all of it less overwhelming and reduce the amount she even brings home?

good luck!!

Hi,

It may be that you and your daughter are different enough that you will end up needing to both feel a little uncomfortable. It sounds like you've been trying to do that on your end, allowing her room to be over-full.

On one end there are some that consider someone with a spotless desk an uptight neat freak who must have OCD. On the other hand there are those that would consider an adult with a generally messy house who keeps an entire closet stuffed full of mementos such as old ticket stubs, bits of beach glass, a past boyfriend's sweater, etc as hoarding.

Neither of those people probably really have a disorder, if neither has it interfering with their (own) life. There are enough people with really clear disorders to try to not worry too much about the ones currently on the normal spectrum.

Being a total non-professional, it doesn't really sound like she has a serious problem currently. But more the very common messy kid who feels attached to all their stuff to the point of feeling like their stuff is an extension of themselves.

You do have the right to not be extremely mentally uncomfortable in your home (as she does also).

Perhaps if you sit down and talk you can come to a compromise that will allow you both something. For example that you'll let her have freedom with whatever will fit in her own closet as long as she will put her own clothes away and bring the laundry out and keep the door to it closed so you don't have to see. Or perhaps a different style of compromise is she gets more freedom with keeping her papers etc but she agrees to be much more careful about not leaving items around in the rest of the house where they bother your natural sense of order.

Personal growth for all through valuing eachother's right to be different.

I did give her a (relatively large) box with a lid, so we'll see how that goes. I think she will just ask for another.

I don't see her as actually having a hoarding problem. I see the problem as a manifestation of anxiety issues (she does have an anxiety dx) as well as likely just a personal way of being. It's hard to know which is which sometimes, right?

I am sooooo not OCD and you should see my closets. They are pretty darn messy. I do like order in my workspace, though--I think it's because I will otherwise be distracted by it visually. I can't SEE into the closets. But I do agree that some of this is about different personalities. Sometimes I think the universe sent me DD as a learning experience.


Whta a good idea! I hadn't thought of this.

To my way of thinking, if nobody has a problem with the mess/objects being in the house, then the hoarding is not a problem-- but the anxiety itself is worth getting a handle on. This kind of anxiety is (in our experience anyhow) the kind that feeds off being indulged, turning into a bigger thing over time. To me, the anxiety seems worth addressing (by working on the anxiety in general and by teaching the skill of throwing something out in particular).

I am untidy and always have been-- but I am very glad that my parents made me get a handle on my pack-rat anxiety as a kid, because as an adult you have to manage bigger decision-making, some of which is also anxiety-producing. This is an opportunity to build the "I'll decide and it will be okay" muscles.

DeeDee

hee - i know what you mean! our girl asked for a second box the first time the lid wouldn't close - but we just reminded her that the box system is hers to manage - if it's overflowing, or i find things stored elsewhere, they're automatically recycled. she really responds to having control, so i kind of routinely use that against her.

and it is pretty funny how just having a kid will teach you SO fast what you need to learn, isn't it!