The Stuff at Mom’s House and the Stuff at Dad’s House: The Material Consumption of Divorce for Adolescents

Abstract

Our life-stories as social actors can be told through our objects, our places, and our consumption practices. Once told, these stories can reveal the active individual and collective meaning-making processes that are at stake in home consumption, and they can illuminate the many intersections between identities, interactions, and the material culture of homes (Hurdley 2006). The first decade of this millennium has seen an increase, albeit slow, in multidisciplinary research and theorizing about home consumption, defined recently by Reimer and Leslie (2004:188) as ‘the purchasing, acquisition, and display of furniture and other domestic goods’ in homes. Missing from this body of knowledge are the stories of consumption practices of young family members, and specifically stories of consumption practices that are part of a process of family dissolution. As the above quotation illustrates, after a divorce, a child’s life is split between two places, but often one place feels more representative of her identity than another. Examining what children and adolescents consume and display (or are given no choice but to display) in their dwellings during and after their parents’ divorce can shed light not only on their own identity formation, but also on the dynamics of the shifting familial relationships contained within those dwellings.

Caitlyn: Why are some of the items that you’ve mentioned at one place rather than the other?

Paige: Um, like all the pictures and memory stuff is over here ‘cause my life is over here…