Yep, these look just like most all the homes of families with children I know, 2 working parents or not. In fact, the homes with one parent home seem to be even worse, but that might be a homeschooling issue. Then again, I also homeschool and everything lives neatly on an enclosed bookshelf and small hutch in our dining room. ~shrug~
I am also very happy to report that our home does not look like those homes. We can actually get three cars in the three car garage. The attic is empty. The basement houses only my sewing supplies and beer making supplies. My fridge door is empty of all clutter. I regularly donate toys and clothes to the thrift stores. I regularly go through paperwork and sell read books and unused games. I also carefully monitor what comes in to the house. A few years ago, I kept track of every non-consumable item that game in and it amounted to less than 100 items per month. This included everything we replaced that was broken as well as all the toys and clothes people gave to our children(and we had a newborn at the time and two sets of close grandparents). That same year, I also sent over 4000 items out of our home and storage shed. It's crucial with kids to keep on top of the stuff!
My inspirations for keeping the clutter down with kids in the house was growing up in a home way worse than anything pictured in the videos(literally walking on 3 inches of clothes and toys in bedrooms, books and papers covering every surface in living rooms, a yard like a junkyard- I don't blame my parents, they were fighting a losing battle which is a longer story than I'll share here)and my amazing grandmother. I didn't actually "like" this grandmother but she was so inspiring. She got up every morning at 5(even when she had her three young children), started breakfast, started a load of laundry, vacuumed/mopped/dusted the entire house, finished and served breakfast, cleaned up the kitchen-never saw a dirty dish in her kitchen-, hung the load of laundry out on the line, filled her bird and hummingbird feeders, then worked in her pretty flower beds for 10 minutes. We lived next door and I saw her do this routine every morning for 15+ years. By 8am every morning she was ready for visitors and she always had them. Friends and family came over to linger at her kitchen table, drink tea and gossip, sometimes all day. She'd pull out sandwich fixings and soup for lunch and the conversation would continue.
And that brings me to what I think is the driving force behind this degeneration in American homes....lack of regularly entertaining friends and family who have decent cleanliness standards. When I know people will be over regularly, I clean more. My standards go up. I don't just want to open a box of food for guests, I want to fix them something homemade and unique. Maybe I want to do this because I was exposed to people with standards like that. Most parents I know have friends who don't care as much as they don't care. They have plenty of friends over but everyone steps over the strewn clutter like it's not there as they stand around eating hot dogs from the grill or a chain take-out pizza, chips and soda.
I don't get up at 5am like my grandmother and I don't clean like she did everyday, but the house gets a good pick-up twice a week as well as a thorough cleaning every Saturday. Every year my goal is to remove 2000+ items from our home(trash, donate, sell)over the course of the entire year. In addition, I purge another 1000 in the Fall.
I tried to teach some of my family and friends my strategies for decluttering a little bit at a time without much success. Once while over a friend's home, she pulled 4 giant garbage bags of baby clothes from her storage shed looking for a particular item to give to another friend's baby. All the clothes were outgrown on her youngest child and she cannot have any more children. It's moments like these that you send the stuff out. You don't need it now, won't need it in the future and you already have it out of the shed so just walk it to the car or send it all to the friend instead of putting it back in the shed. But no, back in to the shed the bags went. :(
