People tend to worry about home mess too much, and often for no good reason.  Many of us are busier than ever with work or parenting or both, and letting your home get a little, or even more than a little, messy probably isn't going to hurt anyone.  But there's a great deal of external pressure to keep a reasonably neat home, and not just from the constant stream of "be-neat" messages we get from the media.  It also comes from friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives.  The fact is, many people will think less of you for keeping a messy home.  And occasionally, they'll even let you know about it. 

In one unpretentious neighborhood in Florida a young professional couple with two children sometimes left toys and tricycles and the like sitting in the yard.  A group of their neighbors, some of whom are full-time homemakers or retirees with a little more time on their hands, decided they were tired of looking at the modest clutter and came over one morning when no one was at home to clean the yard up.  One can imagine how mortified the couple was to learn about the secret tidying party.  Neighbors aren't likely to come inside your home to do the same, but relatives and more outspoken friends won't always resist the urge to make comments about your clutter.  And while people meeting you for the first time probably won't say anything about the messiness of your home, they may well be busy forming a vivid first impression based on it.  According to a study at the University of Texas at Austin, people walking into the room of a stranger when he or she isn't present form surprisingly strong and detailed opinions about that person--including the conviction that a cluttered room is a sign of person who isn't "conscientious."
     And just hope your messy home doesn't one day get introduced to a jury of your peers.  When Michael Jackson was facing charges of molesting a 13-year-old boy, the courtroom was presented a video tour of the pop star's home taken by the local sheriff's office during a raid.  Of central interest, according to several news accounts of the video tour, was the lack of conventional order in Jackson's home.  As CNN put it, "The video showed the house cluttered with shoe boxes, books and a variety of objects stacked on the floors."  Agence France-Press noted, "The overall image was a peculiar mix of ostentatious opulence and cluttered confusion."  Mentioned almost parenthetically in some of the accounts, and omitted from others altogether, was the fact that the raid had turned up pornographic magazines that contained both Jackson's and his accuser's fingerprints.  Apparently, the real damning evidence was those scattered shoeboxes.

If you're a parent, aren't you failing your children by keeping a messy home?  Aside from the fact that you're passing on the curse of messiness, you're also making your children stupid, according to a study at Pennsylvania State University.  Researchers there looked at historical British databases of information on twins to determined that "disorganized" homes tend to produce children with lower cognitive skills.  Oh, by the way--home order, as characterized in the study, also correlated with parental socio-economic status and the level of parental education.  But the study's authors claim they took all that into account, and were able to pin the "profound" deficit of cognitive skills that turned up in many messy homes on the disorder itself.  So it's not less-educated parents, rough neighborhoods and poor schools that adversely affect children's test performance; it's keeping a messy home.  Well, could it possibly have turned out otherwise?  The study's authors didn't think so.  "It just makes sense," one of the researchers was quoted as saying.  "If a kid is in a really chaotic home, it's hard to imagine that they can learn in a normal way."  Given that any other findings would have been nearly unimaginable--it's obvious that messy homes stunt kids' brains--it's impressive the researchers went through the trouble of running any data through their models.

Actually, messy homes can provide a far more inviting and nurturing environment than highly ordered ones.  For one thing, cluttered homes tell us more about the personalities of its occupants than do homes stripped to their carefully arranged essentials--it's the optional, extraneous items we leave lying around that bear the stamp of our quirky inner selves.  The authors of the University of Texas study of how people judge others by their rooms take the time in the study to quote from John Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie:


Specifically, the authors note, what Lonesome Harry left behind were laundry receipts, a discarded unfinished letter, an empty bourbon bottle, and other elements of what we'd have to consider something of a mess.  "It would seem," the authors go on to say, "that the environments that people craft around themselves are rich with information about their personalities, values, and lifestyles."  Unless, of course, the environments are sparse and pristine, in which case we learn only that their occupants are neat freaks.

The writer Caitlin Flanagan has posited that people who are tempted to turn to professional organizers often feel that something is out of kilter in their lives, and they mistakenly attribute the problem to a lack of neatness and order in their homes.  She goes on to quote from Cheryl Mendelson's book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, which notes this of home-order enthusiasts:


Even some interior designers are now explicitly embracing mess in their work.  Ilse Crawford, the former editor of Elle Decoration who runs an acclaimed London design firm, filled her recent book, "Home Is Where the Heart Is," with photographs of jammed rooms strewn with hodge-podges of mismatching pillows, scattered clothes, and even litter.  Calling the home "a canvas for self-expression," Crawford has explained that her intention is to counter the sparse and overly ordered sensibility that has dominated home interior design, and to achieve an effect that feels more relaxed, human and intimate, with a large measure of what she calls "laissez-faire"--inspired in part, she says, by psychologist Abraham Maslow's "self-actualization" theory and its appreciation of spontaneity and individuality.  (Speaking of home mess and the inner mind, Freud was an inveterate clutterer who jammed an antique collection of some 2,000 pieces into his home and office.)

Aesthetic preference and emotional comfort aside, what about physical health?  Isn't a neater home cleaner, and therefore less likely to harbor disease-causing germs?  Not to get hung up on semantics here, but cleanliness usually refers to an absence of grime, which could include stray microorganisms and other biological matter, while neatness implies an absence of clutter and disarray.  One could imagine being messy but clean, with spotless items strewn over a spotless floor, or neat but not clean, with a completely stripped down room coated with slime.  But it's not unreasonable to assume some overlap between mess and uncleanliness.  For one thing, it's harder to clean with lots of stuff scattered around.  And let's be realistic: if a person is too busy to pick up around the house, then he or she may well be too busy to vacuum and scrub with any frequency, too.

Our society has become somewhat germaphobic.  In a poll of more than 3,600 visitors to the ChildFun Family Website, two-thirds of respondents said they wash their hands eight or more times a day, and more than a fifth of them wash more than 20 times a day.  A fond wish of a growing number of Americans is to be able to move through the world outside their homes without ever having to touch anything.  Mike Herpio is the head of a Finnish company called FogScreen that markets a device that replaces computer or television screens with a nearly invisible slab of water vapor onto which images can be projected.  The effect is of an image hanging in mid-air, and a person can interact with the image--selecting buttons, for example, or punching in numbers--by poking at the image with a finger.  For all the interesting applications that might come to mind for a video or computer image that can be instantly conjured up to float in space, Herpio reports that one of the biggest near-term demands is for installing the device in public information kiosks, because people are becoming increasingly uneasy about punching touchscreens or keyboards that other human fingers have touched.

The risks are hugely overblown.  The Today Show sent an infectious disease specialist on a tour of New York City malls, subways and public bathrooms to swab many of the various surfaces people might touch, dutifully reporting the revolting findings.  (Fecal matter on escalator railings!)  Slipped in at the end of the segment, almost in passing, was the expert's comment that none of the terrible-sounding microbes found in a busy day of swabbing was likely to cause illness.  Germs encountered on the surfaces inside homes are even less likely to be problematic.  So don't put too much stock in the advice of home hygiene experts, who not all that long ago urged chucking out messy wooden cutting boards in favor of neat, smooth plastic ones that wouldn't harbor germs--advice that turned out to be exactly backwards.

Parents, unsurprisingly, are particularly sensitive to warnings about hygiene.  The poll of six- to twelve-year-olds' parents mentioned in the previous chapter found that 96 percent of parents "believe that the cleanliness of a child's room is very or somewhat important to their child's health."  Germs aren't the only concern; allergy triggers such as dust mites and pet dander are perceived as equally serious threats.  Two-thirds of the respondents managed to find time to vacuum their children's rooms once a week or more.  It's true, allergens found in the home may cause difficulties for some of the 50 million children and adults in the U.S. who suffer from asthma or other respiratory illnesses.  But most asthma and allergy experts now maintain that exposure to common triggers can't actually cause these ailments, as was once believed. 

Guess what can, though: very clean homes.  Researchers at the Curtin University of Technology in Australia found that children exposed to fumes from home cleaning products, among other chemicals, were up to four times more likely to develop asthma even when exposure remained within what are currently regarded as safe levels.  Another risk factor, oddly enough, is an unusually low level of allergens in the home.  According to research reported in the British medical journal Thorax, children who aren't sufficiently exposed to allergens when they're very young are more likely to develop reactions when later exposed to normal levels.  Kids who confront allergens all along, on the other hand, are more likely to become desensitized to them.  Those scrubbing their hands and homes with antibacterial cleansers might also ponder the growing body of evidence that these cleansers produce even hardier strains of bacteria than the ones they're designed to kill.

As for children needing neatness and order in their environment to learn normally, that quaint but persistent notion has been discredited.  Studying in a noisy, messy, disordered home may seem like a common sense-defying circus trick  to those of us who were brought up decades ago in relatively orderly homes run by a full-time homemaker, and who were conditioned to seek out stillness when in need of concentration.  But today, with both parents often working and overtaxed, there is rarely anyone standing over a student's shoulder trying to enforce a neat-and-quiet-work-area rule.  And as it turns out, children appear to be able to study comfortably and effectively while listening to music blaring through earbuds, carrying on a dozen simultaneous instant-messaging conversations on the computer, working the cellphone, and fending off the massive, messy pile of books and papers spilling out of a bursting-to-the-seams backpack.  In fact, studies have shown that movement and various other forms of stimulation during learning can help create a "memory stamping" effect that aids in retaining information.  A Cornell University study of students allowed to surf the Web during class found that the more often students turned their attention to the Web the likelier they were to get higher grades, and that held true in both lecture and discussion-style classes.  Many elementary and high schools, for that matter, don't have "libraries" any more; they have bustling, buzzy "multimedia centers."  In short, parents who must choose between spending time maintaining a neat and orderly home, and helping children with homework, attending their numerous extra-curricular events, and in general being nurturing and supportive, shouldn't have to labor over the decision....