Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
I find myself cackling on the phone as Steve Johnson, 72, wades through his basement in the Atlanta suburbs, describing "all the crap" his four adult children have left behind. There are vinyl records, Braves bobble-heads, Pink Floyd posters, a drum, guitar stands, books, mounds of CDs. "Is this a picture of Bob Marley? Oh my God. Bob Marley is in my basement still," Johnson says, one of half a dozen exclamations invoking the Almighty's name during our conversation. His daughter's old exercise ball gets an audible, "Ugh." The camping gear from his kids' festival days gets another, "Oh my God." A violin from a child's ill-fated middle-school music career gives rise to an, "Ope."
"Sorry as I walk through memory lane here," he says.
Johnson, who recently retired, has asked his kids to figure out what to do with everything they've left behind in their family home, with limited success. "Best I can tell, they don't care anymore, which is fine," he says. Except getting rid of all the stuff can be surprisingly hard — Goodwill, other charities, and secondhand stores won't take just anything. During a remodel, he used a half-full dumpster to offload some things, but he didn't love doing it. "I feel bad about that, honestly, just trashing stuff," he says, sounding exasperated as he spots an old flamingo in the basement that his wife probably wants.
Much has been made — including by yours truly — of the impending avalanche of baby boomers' stuff. But in boomers' defense, they are not the only ones who've accumulated useless things they can't bring themselves to get rid of. Many younger generations — Gen X, millennials, and, soon enough, Gen Z — are using their parents' homes as storage units. They haven't failed to launch, they've just failed to load up their rocketships, leaving their parents drowning in yearbooks, prom dresses, and Little League trophies.
Many storage freeloaders have built lives and families of their own, and they don't have the time or energy to whittle down their old comic-book collections or toss out the college notes piled up in their parents' garages. Others still haven't bought homes or are living in small spaces, hoping that someday they'll have room for everything they left behind — even though "someday" is increasingly looking like once they're AARP eligible. Their parents may feel time closing in, but they don't feel that same urgency.
When something still lives at your dad's house, it's easy to pretend it's not your problem — even though it very much is. That's how adulthood works: the gradual but jarring realization that the responsibility is yours.
When people move out of their parents' homes, it's natural for them to leave things behind — (hopefully) nobody's hauling their childhood toys to the college dorms or filling their first apartment's closets with high school outfits. Even when people get a place of their own, it's often in tighter quarters than the homes they grew up in. Leaving things with their parents seems not only convenient but also logical. Plus, many older parents like to keep their children's stuff around. It helps mitigate empty-nest syndrome, allowing them to continue being the anchors of the family. Or, they just feel weird about throwing their kids' things out.
The result: Mom and Dad don't want to cut the strings, and the kids want the option of keeping their stuff without the responsibility.
"A lot of times, the parents just feel like it's not their place to make a decision," says Mindy Godding, the owner of Abundance Organizing in Virginia. Meanwhile, their children just kick the can down the road. "Instead of having to actually go through that stuff and make some decisions, the kid doesn't want to deal with it."
They haven't failed to launch, they've just failed to load up their rocketships.
Alex Kovalenko, 44, knows he should move the junk that's taking up a big chunk of space in his dad's work warehouse about 30 minutes away for a decade. But Kovalenko and his wife, who live in the Toronto suburbs, have three kids and full-time jobs, and they feel like they're just too busy to carve out the time to sort through it all. He doesn't know what he'd do with everything anyway, and doubts he'd make much money selling it. "I don't think it's fair," he says, especially since his dad's paying for and needs the space, "but I don't think we have any other option that's feasible at this time." His wife has suggested carving out a couple of weeks next summer to go through everything, but that would cut into vacation.
Kristina Markos, 41, is also in the not-dealing-with-it stage. Her in-laws still house stuff above their garage that she and her husband left behind when they moved from Chicago to Boston back in 2013. Her in-laws don't have plans to downsize, and if they do, she figures she'll fly out and rent a U-Haul. "Today, it's not posing a problem for anybody," she says. Markos hopes that her Gen Alpha kids will want some of the things she's stowed away once they're old enough to move out, including curtain rods, sheets, pillows, and tools, after all, her father-in-law just shipped out an old trumpet for her son. "That's the sustainability piece and the money-saving piece where I think it works for everybody," she says. Trumpet aside, I wonder what condition many of the possessions she's described will be in by the time her kids head to college, or whether Gen Alpha, like their millennial parents, will spurn their elders' hand-me-downs.
For some people, it's not just logistics or laziness that get in the way. Grief and guilt can turn a small box of old stuff into an emotional minefield. Ripley Neff is acutely aware of the headache it can be to get rid of abandoned possessions. She was forced to sort through a lifetime of physical memories when her grandmother died in 2022 and again when her mother died in 2024. Perhaps that's part of why she avoids dealing with the stuff she's got stowed away in the room she grew up in at her living grandmother's house, who she calls her "Grammy." Neff, 31, and her husband have just bought a house in Memphis, but she has no immediate plans to take all those odds and ends with her, and her grandmother doesn't seem pressed about it. Her husband encouraged her to get ahead of it, but she's been thrust into a situation many people don't encounter until they're later in adulthood: being in charge. "There are times when I know he's right, but then there are also times when I feel like it's all being put as my responsibility, and I am the child and the grandchild," she says. "I wish someone else would think about this, too."
These types of dynamics are nearly universal. The more I asked around, the more stories bubbled up. One friend acknowledged that while it's a little ridiculous to have saved all of her middle school and high school notes for 20-some years, it's been a hoot going through them with her parents. A colleague mentioned his parents have declared that the stuff they've stored for him and his siblings be reduced to a two-box maximum over the holidays. One woman told me she was too afraid to have her stuff shipped from her parents' home because in a previous attempt to send a few boxes, prized possessions had been lost. I am guilty on this front as well — last Christmas, my mom pulled out a box of old Barbies I didn't remember existed. Instead of giving my blessing for them to be sold on eBay, I insisted I'd take care of it. I did not.
Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they're projecting that on the kid.
This entire conversation is about more than boxes and Barbies. It's about the emotional weight we put on physical objects, the obligations we have to our loved ones, and the fear of letting go. Throwing away college notes and textbooks means finally admitting you're not going to grad school. Agreeing to give away the drums in your parents' basement is the death knell of your rock-and-roll dreams. On the other side of the equation, older parents often put more weight on their kids' stuff than their kids do — they remember more vividly that third-grade spelling bee victory or the first lost tooth. Parents feel a sense of responsibility as guardians of their children's things and memories.
Godding recalls working with a client whose two children's bedrooms were still in pristine '90s condition. When the mom reached out to her kids, her son insisted that he be allowed to go through everything before she made any decisions, and her daughter said she didn't care about anything and could toss it. "Her mom turns to me and is like, 'I think she's going to regret that decision, I should put that in a storage unit for her,'" Godding says. "Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they're projecting that on the kid."
The thing about this dynamic is that eventually decisions have to be made. No one lives forever, and even if they did, very few people would want their attics filled with their progeny's My Little Ponies and Hot Wheels for all eternity. These leftover items become an unspoken negotiation between generations, and grievances that, at some point, have to be aired. Both sides tend to tread carefully, afraid to make the wrong call.
A couple of years ago, Nicholas Budler's uncle set a deadline on the stuff he'd been stashing at his place since college. So Budler, now 29, put together a "keep" pile of things that could fit into his adult apartment in San Francisco: his degrees, a homerun baseball he'd caught as a kid, and one trinket from each of the important places he'd traveled to. He tossed clothes, decor, and useless chargers.
"That's where it's like, 'Can I envision this in the future in my actual home now as an adult, or did I just want to keep this somewhere without having it to be in my space?'" he says. "If it's moving from junk drawer to junk drawer, it's probably not something that you really care about."
Budler does regret giving away so many books, and he's now replenishing his library.
For the Gen Xers in the room, I have some good news for you: You're actually pretty good about this! Millennials are generally guiltier of treating their parents' homes like giant lockers, Godding says. They don't have the independence streak Gen X latchkey kids did.
I first got in touch with Johnson, the boomer dad in the basement, because he emailed me after a story I'd written about the impending baby boomer stuffpolcalypse, asking, "What's a boomer to do???" with their kids' stuff. So, I turned to the experts.
When I ask Tonya Kubo, who until recently worked for Clutter Free Academy, a platform dedicated to all things decluttering, she tells me older parents need to have a "hard conversation" with themselves to decide whether they're keeping their children's stuff because they want to or simply out of obligation. If the answer is the latter, the kids have to take responsibility for it now, because "the fact is they're going to have to take responsibility for it when you die," she says. She recalls working with a mother who was holding onto three of her son's motorcycles in her garage while she and her husband paid for two storage units filled with their own things. Kubo had assumed the son was in his early 20s — he was 40, married, with kids. "It had never occurred to her" to ask him to get rid of them. Once she did, they were sold in two weeks.
For kids, it's essential to confront the reality that if they're comfortable not having something now, they probably don't need it or value it as much as they think. "If I don't have a place for it now, am I really going to make a place for it later? And when I do want to make a place for it, does it even fit into my life?" she says.
Godding encourages her downsizing clients to send their kids photos of items and ask whether they matter to them. "We're always trying to peel apart the storytelling," she says.
Every generation in this country has a consumption problem.
Another tip: Set a deadline or, at the very least, a goal. The kids don't have to spend the entirety of the next visit combing through their stuff, but they can set aside some time to edit it down. And if you're thinking about a storage unit, really think about it. Again, if you don't want the things today, or even don't have the space for them, how likely is it that you will ever change?
As for where to take things, Godding prefers Buy Nothing groups and local charitable organizations. While some people may have their gripes with Goodwill, it's often a convenient option. Still, the truth is that it's hard to offload a lot of things if they go out of style or are difficult to handle, from furniture to figurines. And the American consumer machine churns on buying, not reusing.
"Every generation in this country has a consumption problem," she says. "We are hardwired to buy new."
Inevitably, what this may wind up looking like is Gen Xers, millennials, Zoomers, and beyond sitting with all their accumulated stuff in their own homes eventually, perhaps on top of the stuff they received from their parents. That's what's happened to Jon Spike, 37, from Wisconsin. A month after he and his wife bought a house, his mom showed up with boxes of the stuff she'd kept from his childhood. Now, they're sitting in his basement. The stuff cycle begins anew.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
