Children of Hoarders

continued

Another Ann Arbor woman told me tearfully about her repeated, unsuccessful attempts to get her elderly mother to acknowledge her hoarding problem. Both her parents are physically frail, and she believes that their home is an accident waiting to happen. "And when it does," she says bitterly, "People will say, 'Where were the children?'"   

[Originally published in December, 2011.]

 

What a sad story! It goes to show that children are not always to blame when the hoarding continues! In the cases described here, it is beyond the powers of relatives alone to cure -- and the children should rest assured that they have done their best.