Hey, boomer parents! If you haven’t discovered the hard truth already, here it is: your kids still don’t want all the stuff you’ve accumulated over the years. And neither do your grandkids.
This may come as a shock to boomers seeking to declutter and downsize, but the sooner we of that generation face the reality, the less family conflict we will have to experience.
It was back in 2017 when retirement writer Richard Eisenberg first wrote an essay for NextAvenue that helped spawn the phrase, “Your kids don’t want your stuff.” In the years that followed, the article went viral and prompted a host of spinoffs and social media sites.
Now, Eisenberg is back with this updated version of his 2017 article. The most important takeaway is that little has changed. “Millennials,” Eisenberg writes, “are getting stuck inheriting collections and they’re not having it.” Boomer parents need to pay attention.
Kids Still Dealing with Possessions from Parents – and Grandparents
“There are 10 overstuffed boxes in the living room of Nick Fox and his wife Sarah,” Eisenberg begins. “It’s not that the Millennial couple haven’t unpacked their central Florida house. The boxes contain collections from Sarah’s grandmother Nani who died in 2018 and, Nick says, had a shopping addiction.”
Sarah’s mom, Liz, is a boomer who took on the chore of triaging all of Nani’s stuff, which was mostly forgotten in a closet for years.
“We’ve gotten some of it because we said ‘yes’ to it and other stuff because Liz is just trying to get rid of it,” says Nick Fox, 40.
“The Baby Boom Stuff Avalanche” is Hitting Adult Kids
The amount of assets estimated to transfer to Millennials from their boomer parents and Silent Generation grandparents is sitting around $27 to $46 trillion, in what is being called “The Great Wealth Transfer,” “The Great Stuff Transfer,” or even “The Baby Boom Stuff Avalanche.”
“It’s about Oneida plates, Longaberger baskets, Hummel figurines, Dansk kitchenware, Pez dispensers, Beanie Babies and other tchotchkes the Millennials are getting, often not by choice,” Eisenberg writes. “And it’s a certifiable trend described in recent Business Insider and Bloomberg Businessweek articles.”
Kids “Overwhelmed, Anxious” as Inherited Stuff Becomes a Burden
Nick Fox has his own take on this: a “Millennial Inheritance” video series that has struck a nerve with his hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok. “[All] of his followers watch him exasperatingly talk about the stuff he and fellow members of his community have found themselves living amid,” Eisenberg explains.
Fox invites fellow members of “The Millennial Inheritance Community” to send him their own videos and photos of the strange objects and collections they’ve inherited from their loved ones. “And they have,” adds Eisenberg, “including one who sent a video showing their armoire filled with 20 Lord of the Rings goblets.”
Fox explains, “This is content that really is resonating with people who are gravitating towards the feeling of needing therapy for being shouldered with all the stuff they inherit. The result of feeling overwhelmed is anxiety that already permeates for this generation.”
Fittingly, Fox calls himself “the accidental spokesperson for the emotionally overwhelmed children of baby boomers everywhere.”
Inherited Stuff Doesn’t Fit Small Living Spaces, Lifestyle Changes
Eisenberg admits: as one of those boomers himself, he can relate “in two ways.”
He explains, “In 2017, I wrote what became a viral Next Avenue article called ‘Sorry, Nobody Wants Your Parents’ Stuff’ when my father died and my sister and I found ourselves unable to locate places or people who wanted the items that had belonged to him and our late mother. The story about the situation that boomers like us were experiencing quickly garnered more than 1.5 million views, 32,000 Facebook shares and 5,500 comments and was printed over 3,100 times.”
Now, Eisenberg and his wife find themselves downsizing for an eventual move from a New Jersey suburb to Los Angeles, to be nearer their Millennial-age sons. “So, we’re doing whatever we can to prevent our adult kids from being forced to take things of ours or from our parents that don’t interest them due to style or their already packed living space,” he writes.
Are Millennials Ungrateful, or Simply Exhausted?
Some who comment on the Millennial Inheritance videos ascribe a lack of gratitude to the Millennial generation when it comes to items they receive from their loved ones.
But Fox disagrees.
“It’s not about being ungrateful,” he says in one of his videos. “It’s about being exhausted emotionally, physically and mentally from managing generations of other people’s stuff. When someone comments, ‘be grateful,’ I want to ask: ‘How many boxes of somebody else’s memories do you have space for in your house? How much time do you want to spend sorting through things you never asked for?’”
Boomer Parents Need Less Procrastination, More Empathy
Still, some critics say that Millennials should be more appreciative of the things their parents set aside to give them.
“But that’s often not what’s happening,” says Fox. “What I’m seeing is people who had a whole bunch of stuff in their garage and felt ‘We’ll get to it when we get to it.’ And I’m seeing people with collections of Carnival glass or Hummels whose Millennial children are essentially saying, ‘Why am I being saddled with your collection?’”
To this, his response is blunt: “How long do you want me to grieve for you when you die? Because going through your belongings really cuts that short. There’s a lot of pain and anguish and ‘Why did you do this to me?’”
In short, Fox believes Millennials are carrying the weight of “making bold choices for someone else’s belongings.”
Parents Should Purge Their Possessions While Healthy
For boomer parents who are open to making things easier for their Millennial kids, Fox has a few suggestions.
First: try Swedish Death Cleaning, which means getting rid of things you know that your family won’t want, or want to deal with, after you die.
“It’s essentially the idea that you’ve enjoyed your collection of toy trains in your basement for long enough,” Fox says. “Purge them now, while you’re alive, so you can ensure they go to somebody as passionate about them as you are.”
Have “Frank Conversations” with Your Kids, Then Clear the Decks
This also necessitates having frank conversations with your adult kids to determine which items you have that they might actually want, Fox advises. Some boomers have been inspired by his videos to begin this process.
“They say, ‘Now I see that your generation really doesn’t want my 15 ballerinas in a glass case,’ or whatever,” he says.
Ultimately, this is the message he hopes that well-meaning boomers will receive from his humor, especially since most Millennials recognize that their boomer parents are also dealing with inheriting their parents’ stuff, too.
“So let’s go through it now together,” Fox says.
Once you know what items your kids don’t want, find a way to give them away or sell them; certain pieces that you own may have value to other collectors out there, something Fox discovered while making his videos.
“I didn’t realize that Uranium glass was as sought after as it was,” he says. (Some high-end vintage Uranium glassware sells for $1,000 to $4,000, Eisenberg adds.)
Millennials: Your Parents’ Home Isn’t Your Storage Unit
To conclude the article, Eisenberg notes that the problem is often exacerbated by Millennials having too much of their own stuff and using their parents’ homes as storage units.
Start decluttering now, Fox says, or get ready to be “on the other side of the stuff equation.”
He quips, in his characteristic humor, “I’ve been joking on social media that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are going to know what it’s like to have 10 versions of Taylor Swift albums and Labubu and Funko Pops.” In other words, perhaps the cycle of having too much stuff will go on!
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(originally reported at www.nextavenue.org)
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