Tiffany Hanssen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show here on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Brian today. He will be back on Monday. Right now, we're going to tie up this show with a little advice for what can be, for some people, a particularly uncomfortable conversation between adult children and their parents. What are we going to do with all of this stuff? Have your parents amassed collections of knick-knacks, gadgets, antiques, heirlooms, other items that maybe you classify as junk? Maybe they bring you random little items whenever they visit, try to foist a whole bunch of stuff to you en masse during your trips home? Are they sensitively leading decluttering efforts, or is it turning into a knock-down-drag-out?

Well, you can call, let us know what your experience is. 212-433-9692. You can call us, you can text us at that number. With us to talk about it and shed a little light on this potentially big family conflict is Emily Stewart, senior correspondent at Business Insider. Hi, Emily.

Emily Stewart: Good morning.

Tiffany Hanssen: All right. For well-off parents who pass away, leave their kids, or maybe they're just downsizing, leave their kids with lots of stuff to sort through. You write that Gen X, millennials, Gen Z are becoming really inundated with this boomer windfall of items, and maybe even not just their stuff, but from previous generations. What is it about boomers that makes them have so much more stuff than the rest of us, maybe?

Emily Stewart: To some extent, this isn't necessarily just about baby boomers. We all accumulate a lot of things across our lifetimes. That being said, we know that baby boomers do have some characteristics. They were raised by parents who were Depression babies, who were like, "You have to hold on to everything because we don't have that many things." We also know they grew up in an era of a real economic boom, and baby boomers were like the more, more, more generation. They liked stuff. They liked collecting things.

In the '80s, it was really a thing where you wanted to have-- like, the person who has the most stuff wins. I think we just have baby boomers really have had a lifetime to accumulate stuff, and they like stuff. They have wedding china, and they have silver, and they have all sorts of knick-knacks. It's not just their own stuff either. Like you said, they have their parents' stuff. A lot of times, for their Gen X and millennial kids, we're guilty of leaving our stuff in our parents' homes.

Now, as they age and some of them start to think about downsizing, they're looking in their garages, their basements, and they're thinking, "Oh, boy, what do I do with this?" Their kids are coming home for the holidays, and they're saying, "Oh, boy, what do you do with this, and is this my problem?"

Tiffany Hanssen: I did have a little bit of that reverse conversation you mentioned there. Last night, I was talking with my son about the fact that we still have a storage unit full of stuff, some of which is his. It was me that was saying, "Buddy, you got to get this stuff out of here. We're not holding onto it anymore." That is not really the more common thing we're talking about here, which is parents leaving their kids with stuff, which I will do to him, by the way. I know that my mother will leave things to me, a lot of which I'm looking forward to. It's not all bad, right?

Emily Stewart: Yes, it's not all bad. I think there are some things that people really like. I think sometimes where the issue comes in is, for example, my mother's memories are not my memories, and the things that she cares about may not be the things that I care about. We attach a lot of emotion to our possessions. If my mother wants to leave me something and I don't want it, that's a lot of guilt for me. Maybe that hurts her feelings.

I think for families, it's a really fraught situation because it is everything. It's not just like a ring or a family heirloom. It's also, what do you do with your spoon collection that you've been building for years, or what do you do with your clothes? Really, over the course of our lives, we accumulate so many things. Some of it is nice and positive, but I think some of it is pretty fraught and difficult. It is an emotional thing to get rid of things. We care about our stuff, we value our things. It can be a little bit hard if there is something where a parent really wants their child to take, and their child is like, "Oh, man, I really don't care about this. I really don't want this."

Also, there's a level of guilt, where it's like, maybe dishes have been passed out in the family, and you think you should take them. Also, especially now, if you're a millennial or Gen Z living in New York City, you might not even have space for them. You bring up the storage unit. Last year, I did a story on this, talking to a bunch of downsizers, and they all were very against storage units.

Tiffany Hanssen: Oh, yes.

Emily Stewart: I don't know if that's the right advice to everybody, but I think it comes-- A lot of them said, "If you don't want, whatever, this furniture from your grandparents now, are you going to want it 10 years and $20,000 later?" Probably not.

Tiffany Hanssen: Storage units kick the can down the road, no doubt about it. All right, we have a text here. "My late artist father left me with more than 2,000 pieces of his own work, presumably artwork. He has work at the Met, the Whitney, but otherwise, there has been no market for it since the '50s through the '70s, when he was pretty successful. I've given away about 100 pieces in recent years, but now I'm stuck knowing what to do with it."

That seems like a pretty big onus to have on someone, and I think that that maybe falls on more people than not, Emily, where there is something that is of value, it has historical value. Not just a personal value, but a value to art lovers or people who love Widget X, whatever it is. How do you facilitate that without coming off like just a jerk?

Emily Stewart: I spoke with an antique dealer last year about this, and he said part of my job is to sometimes break people's hearts, that people will come in, say, "Here's this art from my dad," or "Here's this tea set that Grandma really held onto that she thought was going to be worth money someday. I thought it was going to be worth money someday, and it's not worth money."

What he told me at that moment was-- Sometimes I explained to them, "Just maybe the financial value is not there right now, but that doesn't mean it can't have an emotional value to you. Maybe think about that." Now, that being said, if you're sitting with tons of works of art that you don't know what to do with, that's a hard one. I don't think there are easy answers. I spoke to somebody who is a downsizer professionally, but she was talking about her wedding china, and she really was trying to get rid of it, was trying to give it to her kids. She was trying to sell it and eventually said, "I gave up, and I took it to a church yarn sale."

Sometimes that's just, unfortunately, the reality of the situation. I do think it's important to remember, just because maybe something doesn't have the financial value anymore doesn't mean that it's not valuable in other ways.

Tiffany Hanssen: We are talking with Emily Stewart, who is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, about stuff, what Gen X, millennials, Gen Z are doing as they are becoming more and more inundated with baby boomer stuff from their parents from previous generations. Emily, let's bring our listeners into the conversation. Louisa in Sparta. Hi, Louisa.

Louisa: Hi. How are you? I had to chuckle when I heard this topic. [laughs]

Tiffany Hanssen: All right, let's hear it.

Louisa: Well, I'm 75, so I have amassed an accumulation of stuff that I probably don't even know I have. Every now and then, I go through a suitcase that I'm storing, things that, when I used to be a size 8, and I say, "Oh, my God." I reminisce, and I said, "Do I really need this?" I show it to my daughter, and she cringes, and I say, "Okay." What I decided to do after, I started going to a lot of estate sales. I kind of just like doing that. You never know what you find. I also like to look at the houses. I was stunned by the volume of just stuff that were in some of these homes. These are for people that were seniors and have passed away. They had so much stuff. I just kept thinking about my house.

I'm not overwhelmed with things. When I look at my shelf and the mantel place above the fireplace, the top of my piano, everywhere I look, there's something, there's a bunch of stuff. I have started to downsize. I take a lot of things to the thrift store at the church so that they can benefit from it. I'm hoping that I'm going to be around a lot longer than just a few years. When the time comes, I am not going to have my children have to dig. I think that's got to be such a sad thing for them to experience. I'm going to try and leave the nice stuff and minimal. I've gone so far as to create a when I'm gone book. It has a lot of instructions in there so you don't have to dig through these boxes of papers that I also have.

Tiffany Hanssen: Louisa, I totally appreciate that point of view because, Emily, there is a logistical point of view here, right? It's not just about the sentimentality or not of the stuff. There is real logistical nightmares that can pop up for people. It's a lot of stuff.

Emily Stewart: Yes. I think that's one of the things, especially as I've been thinking about this and reporting on it. I would hear from the professionals on this. A lot of people think we just pull up a dump truck and we do it in a weekend. That is not how any of this works. I don't think anybody can think, "Oh, I can just move out of a house that I've lived in for 40 years in 3 days or throw everything out." I do think it really is a big undertaking.

Some people I talked to said-- especially, it sounds like a situation with Louisa, where it's like start early and you start small. Start on the things that aren't going to be a really big deal to get rid of. You can just take it little by little, so that way, it doesn't feel like such a big undertaking. I think that was helpful to hear. A lot of people said, too. I noticed this with my own mother when I go visit her. It is, "Do you want this? Do you want that? Do you want that?" A lot of the answer sounds like Louisa's daughter. It's like, "Well, no, I don't want this."

Sometimes what you might just want to say is, "Sure, I'll take it." Then you can do whatever you want with it. If you want to take it to Goodwill, that's fine. Because sometimes, your parents, your grandparents, it's not so much that they really care where it's going, but they feel too guilty and burdened about getting rid of the thing. It's kind of like a nice favor to be like, "Here, you take it, and maybe you'll love it and use it, and maybe you'll junk it, and I don't really want to know."

Tiffany Hanssen: Let's bring another caller in here, Emily. Jeff in Cortlandt Manor. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: How are you doing, Tiffany? Great job.

Tiffany Hanssen: Thank you. What do you have to say about all of this?

Jeff: A few years ago, I helped start a company up, that was focused on senior move management. What we've ended up doing a lot of are clean outs when elderly seniors are downsizing, moving into facility, or I'm at a job right now where, for three days, we've been cleaning out a house where the older couple had passed away. The children will come through and take a few things. I appreciate what your previous caller said because most of the items here are multi-generational. The parents have stuff. The kids who grew up there have stuff. We haven't even started the attic yet, and it's been three days and four 30-yard dumpsters.

We end up throwing away so much stuff. We try to donate it. Donation shops won't take a lot because it's older, maybe out of style. The kids don't want it because these large hutches, where are they going to put it in their apartment? The crystal that their parents adored so much, they will end up throwing it--

Tiffany Hanssen: Jeff, I'm sorry to cut you off, but I do want to get Emily's reaction to this about just dumpsters full of stuff.

Emily Stewart: That really is a hard one. Even nowadays, sometimes, like a Goodwill won't take furniture. As he was getting at, certain things go in and out of style. I talked to somebody last year who was doing estate sales down in Texas, and she said, "I can't hold onto an orange couch because all of the Gen Z wants it." That was cool in the '60s. There's a lot of stuff where the big brown furniture that people just don't want it. It is a hard situation, because I think we keep saying, "We'll just donate it and donate."

Tiffany Hanssen: Speaking of donating here, Emily, we got a text that says, "I've donated 500 pieces of my dad's artwork to Housing Works. They love art, and it sells well. It's a good cause, a good reminder that you can sometimes find a happy home for these things."

Emily Stewart: Yes, I think that's important to remember. Just because it doesn't stay in the family doesn't mean it can't go somewhere. I think sometimes there are certain things that you do want to stay in the family, but there are certain things that maybe that big old bed your grandchild doesn't want, but somebody will want it, or the art somebody will want.

Tiffany Hanssen: Emily, we're going to have to leave it there. Somebody might want it, right? Senior correspondent at Business Insider. We've been talking about all of your family's stuff. Emily, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.

Emily Stewart: Yes, take care.

Tiffany Hanssen: Listeners, note, Brian will be back on Monday. I'm Tiffany Hanssen. I've been your host today, and we hope you have a great weekend.

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