Holding on to childhood things: storage, emotion, and curation of children’s material biographies

Abstract

Young people in the UK, known as 'generation rent', rely on parents to hold on to their childhood things as they find themselves uprooted and 'space poor'. As such lofts, cupboards, and self-storage units are home to dormant objects that do not fit into everyday life but cannot be thrown away. This paper extends existing scholarship by considering the role of material things in how parents and children relate to one another, exploring how parents engage with and manage their children's material biographies as they move into adulthood and away, spatially and emotionally, from their parents and the family home. We ask what caring, curating, and storing children's possessions means in the context of parenting and care-work more generally. Based on two rounds of in-depth interviews with eight middle-class parents in the UK, we argue that caring for material things can serve as a way for both parents and children to manage feelings of nostalgia, or loss, through this transition. We further argue that these practices serve as a form of material-emotional grounding or effort to generate a sense of security, in the face of uncertainty about what the future may hold in the context of unaffordable housing markets.

Ambivalent storage, multi-scalar generosity, and challenges of/for everyday consumption

“…Since 2014, de-cluttering evangelist Marie Kondo's writings have urged readers to eschew anything that does not 'spark joy' (Kondo, 2014). Although scholarship on the spatial and social dimensions of everyday storage is emerging (e.g., Owen, 2020;Owen & Boyer, 2019), we argue there is more to uncover about what function(s) storage has beyond the immediately practical, such as those that concern the social and/or emotional. Here we ask how care for the self, for others and for things is produced through acts and spaces of storage situated within the home but also extending beyond it through a range of scales.…”

“…We argue that drawing attention to notions of care and generosity (and their intersections) can tell us much about the ambivalent rationalities for keeping. This has the potential to enrich geographical and discard studies with evidence that storage as a process is not simply about the movement of items through homes (Gregson et al, 2007a,b;Owen & Boyer, 2019), or moments where things become 'stuck' (Hirschmann et al, 2012), but where these practices become bound up with various spatial and temporal arrangements of home and understandings of self as situated within multi-scalar networks of material impacts.…”

“…Where an object's material form has remained unsullied, storage can act as a form of time-travel, bringing memories of the past and imaginaries of the future into the present. As Owen and Boyer (2019) describe in their work on the storage of children's toys and clothes, the unboxing of objects allowed their participants to recollect their children as babies and toddlers, whilst simultaneously imagining a future when these items would be passed on to future generations. For Gregson and Beale (2004, p. 699), the storage of baby clothes pre-disposal was never static or stable but 'temporary, transitory, spatial junctures, holding places in the lives of things.'…”

Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities

“…This article instead develops an approach to clutter through a situated ethnographically informed approach which considers how people experience and manage it, and its materiality. I extend the literature on the unseen spaces and objects within the home (Owen & Boyer, 2019;Woodward, 2007Woodward, , 2015 to clutter which is present in both hidden and (yet still unseen) spaces of the home such as chairs or floors. There is a lack of literature which explicitly centres clutter (although see Cwerner & Metcalfe, 2003), which means there is not enough understanding of how people experience and manage it.…”

Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material

“…Disposal and re-categorization of particular kinds of information and objects as “waste” is also an essential part of this work because they enable re-evaluation in light of present conditions and values (Gabrys, 2013; Lucas, 2002). Others have focused upon the processual nature of maintaining collections and memories through the processes of separating, shifting, sorting, and refurbishing (Hurdley, 2013; Owen and Boyer, 2019; Woodward, 2015). Appadurai (1986) and others describe these processes as “enlivenment,” wherein goods obtain meaning through their social use (Skuse, 2005).…”