The Hidden Dangers of a Chaotic Home

Chaotic home

Source: Photo by Şahin Sezer Dinçer on Unsplash

By Sophie von Stumm

Do you sometimes struggle to hear yourself think in your home? Is there always a room with a telly turned on? Is your home a real zoo? People who answered yes to these questions are likely to live with "household chaos"—that is, a home that is noisy, crowded, and unpredictable.

You may ask: So what? Some turmoil is unavoidable. Some disarray is just part of everyday life. And a home without any chaos lacks character anyway. As long as a home is warm, clean, and safe, a little bit of chaos can’t do much harm.

Or can it?

Chaos at Home: More Harm Than Charm

Psychologists have long suspected that experiencing household chaos has dramatic negative effects on children. Several studies have shown that children who are raised in chaotic households tend to have worse developmental outcomes than children from organised homes.

For example, noisy and crowded homes make it difficult to find a quiet place to do homework and focus on studying for school—and children raised in more chaotic homes tend to do worse in school than children from less chaotic homes. Doing well at school is often key to building a career later in life, earning a good salary, and developing positive relationships with people. Thus, through its association with worse school performance, experiencing household chaos in early life may limit children’s life chances.

The Role of Chaos at Home in Children's School Performance

You may wonder, then, whether reducing household chaos could improve children’s grades. In a new study, my co-authors and I found that things are—unfortunately—not that simple.

The study analysed data from more than 7,000 children who were born in the 1990s in the UK. The children reported how chaotic they thought their family homes were when they were 9, 12, and 16 years old. In addition, their corresponding grades for each school year were recorded.

At first, the study showed that growing up in more chaotic family homes was associated with doing worse in school. So far, so predictable: Children who rated their homes as more chaotic at age 9 and 12 years achieved lower grades at age 12 and 16 years, respectively.

But the study’s next finding was a bit more surprising: Children who did well in school at one follow-up tended to report less household chaos at later ones. One possible explanation is that children learn organisational skills at school that they transfer to their family homes. These skills then help lower the household chaos.

Chaos Co-Occurs With—But Doesn't Cause—Poor School Performance

The study then tested whether experiencing household chaos caused worse school grades or vice versa. For this, the study compared identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, and fraternal twins, who share only half of their segregating genes.

Comparisons between identical and fraternal twins help disentangle whether a variable causes a change in another, or whether changes in both variables are driven by confounding. Confounding occurs, for example, when other factors like the family’s income or children’s genetic propensities explain the links between household chaos and school grades.

The study showed that all links between household chaos and school grades were non-causal. These links occur only because of confounding, from genetic and environmental factors that make two twins in a family similar but don’t cause their differences.

Household Chaos Matters for Outcomes Other Than Education

So, it seems that children’s experiences of household chaos are unlikely to be the sole cause of their grades. Yet chaos does matter for children’s mental health.

This was shown in another study I authored, which analysed data from the same twin cohort as before. Twin siblings differed in how chaotic they perceived their household to be, even though they grew up in the same family homes. The twin who experienced the household as more chaotic than their sibling had worse mental health in young adulthood, when the twins were in their early 20s.

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This link did appear to be causal: Experiencing household chaos in childhood magnified later mental health problems, independent of genetic and environmental confounding.

How to Reduce Household Chaos and Protect Your Child's Well-Being

The chaos in our households may not directly affect our children's grades, then, but it can still harm their mental health. Here are three ways to mitigate this risk and reduce chaos in your home now:

1. Don’t turn on multiple sound and image-emitting devices at once. Focus on one at a time to engage with. Quiet is balm for the mind.
2. Tidy up. The less clutter, the fewer misplaced items you see and search for in your home, the clearer your (and your child's) focus will be.
3. Take breaks. It’s lovely having folks over. It’s accomplished to be productive and get things done at work. But nothing freshens the mind like taking time for yourself and your family after a busy period.

Some degree of chaos in one’s home may be unavoidable in everyday life. There’s always a drawer that should be organised, or clutter that could have been avoided. But it’s important to remember that household chaos is not a quirky charm but can harm our mental health—and our children's, too. It’s best to keep the chaos in check as best as we can—starting in our homes!