“I don’t remember ever having had a home-cooked meal,” says Richard, crunching over the food wrappers and crushed cardboard boxes that cover his mother’s kitchen floor.
He glances at the broken cooker, cracked microwave and windows blocked by piles of unwashed mugs, some inexplicably tightly wrapped in cellophane. There are no clear surfaces. Blackened, disintegrating cabinets sag under yet more wreckage. Not an inch of floor can be seen.
“One of my earliest memories is climbing over and under my mother’s hoard to get to this kitchen,” he adds, gesturing at the mountainous towers of tangled possessions overwhelming the house’s open-plan lower floor.
“I was probably about six. I remember something sharp falling on my hand when I was under a pile of stuff. When I got to the kitchen, I realised I was bleeding.”
There was little recognition of the specific problems faced by the children of parents who hoard until a review paper found that about 70% of adults said their hoarding difficulties began when they were aged between 11 and 15.
Experts are now calling on local authorities to intervene earlier with parents who hoard. “We want to prevent the escalation of hoarding by children into more problematic behaviour in adulthood,” said Stuart Whomsley, the author of the paper and lead clinical psychologist for Northamptonshire healthcare NHS foundation trust.
Megan Karnes, of HoardingUK, agreed. “The trauma of growing up in a hoard can trigger hoarding behaviours in a child, although there is also a genetic component,” she said.
HoardingUK is so concerned about the risks and impact on the children of parents who hoard that it is launching a dedicated online support group in April.
“Children of parents who hoard can be at more physical risk than the children of alcoholics,” she said. “As well as the physical dangers of living in a hoard – the fire risks, hygiene, vermin, avalanche risk – the child lives in the visual representation of the parent’s trauma, and therefore experiences trauma themselves.”
Even when the scale of hoarding is less extreme, children of parents who hoard learn to do without basic comforts, including anywhere to play, learn and relax. And they internalise the message that their parent’s objects are more important than they are.
A parent’s hoard also affects their children’s social world. Richard, now 21, still lives with his mother. He worked hard as a child to hide her hoarding disorders from other people, struggling through her chaos to ensure he presented a neat appearance to an outside world that he never allowed through the front door.
He had no playdates or sleepovers. Decades later, he still feels the same distress he experienced when a friend arrived unexpectedly at his door to invite him to the park.
His machinations worked: his mother’s disorder remained hidden. But Richard is now also a hoarder, his room an overwhelming confusion of total disorder washing up against meticulously arranged collections of Warhammer and Lord of the Rings merchandise.
“I can’t move out,” he sighs. “My mum needs me and I’ve got all my stuff here. It’s just too complicated.”
Even if a child does not develop hoarding difficulties of their own, having a parent who hoards precludes any opportunity to learn how to be tidy in later life.
Lily, 32, only learned at university. “I just didn’t see mess, and even when it was pointed out to me I had no idea what to do about it,” she said.
“I’m painfully alert now because I do worry that I might have a genetic pull towards hoarding. But having grown up in a house where nothing was clean, nothing worked and nothing was thrown away means I have absolutely no instinct about what is the right way to acquire possessions, arrange or dispose of them.”
Help is emerging. Jo Cooke, of Hoarding Disorders UK, reports a huge surge in contacts from children’s services, schools and charities such as Home-Start wanting to understand the complexities of hoarding. “We have trained up many in this area,” she said.
Kayley Hyman, a child of a parent who hoarded and the founder of Holistic Hoarding, recruited what she believes to be the UK’s first specialist children and family worker. In the one year, the specialist has prevented 18 children from going into the care system.
“We were getting increasing numbers of referrals where the lead reason for the children going on the child protection register was their home conditions,” Hyman said. “We realised we needed someone to advocate for the child so that the way in which the local authority dealt with the parent’s hoarding behaviours took the needs of their child into account as well.”
Karnes is working with Gloucester city council to focus on children. “What we have in these situations are good parents who have a bad problem,” she said. “We want to make sure the focus of the local authority becomes the child instead of the parent, so that parent is no longer penalised and pressurised to deal with a problem that the evidence proves they can’t solve without time and understanding.
“It means the local authority has to slow right down,” she added. “Instead of just clearing out the parent’s home, they work with the parent to prevent their child suffering the additional trauma of going into care. With enough time and patience, this issue is solvable.”
