Speaking about hoarding really made me wonder about how family dynamic or past living conditions, or purchase patterns of parents or family members affect the future decisions of the children as consumers. I found a really interesting New York Times article related to this very idea of utilitarian hoarding and sentimental hoarding. Often there is a psychological imbalance, fear or tendency that triggers an emotional attachment with personal possessions and results in impulse purchases, unnecessary purchases, and the inability to get rid of the most minuscule object.

Below is an excerpt from the article: 

Holly Sabiston grew up outside Kansas City, Mo., with a parent who had a “junk room” that took over the house... she explained that she accumulated items she thought she would use, and that money concerns kept her from tossing anything.

It stands to reason that someone raised in a home marked by excessive accumulation would have a complex relationship with stuff. Some children of hoarders keep too much; others throw out everything. Both responses may suggest an inability to determine the proper value of objects.

...her lingering discomfort with shopping may be rooted in the fear of becoming a hoarder

...when someone was raised by a hoarder from a very early age, “there’s a likeliness they’ll want to collect.”

WHATEVER balance children of hoarders manage to find in their own homes, there is still the ancestral homestead to contend with — and the knowledge that it is filling up with more junk by the day — so long as the parent with the hoarding problem is alive. After years of pleading and arguing, children of hoarders often abandon all hope that the parent will reform.

Most therapists agree that the disorder is complex and difficult to treat. Dr. Frost noted that there had been some success with cognitive behavior therapy that “includes a combination of things: focusing on controlling the urge to acquire and learning how to break the attachment people have to things.”

Just trying to de-clutter the home doesn’t work, because “you’re dealing with the product of the behavior, not the behavior itself,” he said. “That’s what’s so frustrating to family members — they’re trying to de-clutter and it ends up being a giant argument.”

Living in an environment cluttered with objects and growing up with an influence of bad buying and collecting habits alters the psychological development of the adolescent and it transfers into their personal buying habits and environments as they grow up. It's interesting how they form a tendency to hoard not based on utility or sentiment, but rather, on familiarity and their definition of normal based on what they grew up in. Some youth growing up in this can become strangely conscientious and tidy, ashamed by messiness and therefore on the opposite extreme, refusing to live in the same mess of their parents or they develop similar hoarding patterns. No matter what, they must constantly fight the urge to hold onto things, even when the urge to hoard may have no rhyme or reason.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/garden/children-of-hoarders-on-leaving-the-cluttered-nest.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&