Life At Home In The Twenty-First Century

• Managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers.

• Only 25 percent of garages could be used to store cars because they were so packed with stuff. 

• The rise of big-box stores such as Costco and Sam's Club has increased the tendency to stockpile food and cleaning supplies, making clutter that much harder to contain. 

• The addition of costly "master suites" for parents proved the most common renovation in the homes that were studied, yet the spaces were hardly used.

• Consistent and troublesome bottlenecks emerged in the homes, yet families rarely devoted renovation dollars to remedying these obvious problems.

• Even in a region with clement year-round weather, the families hardly used their yards, and this was the case even among those who had invested in outdoor improvements and furnishings.

• Most of the families relied heavily on convenience foods like frozen meals and par-baked bread, yet they saved an average of only 10 to 12 minutes per meal in doing so. 

• Fragmented dinners — those in which family members eat sequentially or in different rooms — threaten to undermine a sacrosanct American tradition: the family dinner. 

-  That's from the book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open their Doors by Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch & Elinor Ochs