Determining the Effects of Children on the Number of Messes Made in a Home

To figure out the mess levels of your home use the following equation:

m= s(h/2)j(k^2)

where s is the slob factor, m is a measure of the mess, h is the size of the house, j is the number of things in the house and k is the number of children (aged 18 and under).

As we can see from this equation, kids are the biggest contributor to the problem of mess in the home.  It also seems that as the size of the home increases, usually does the number of things and the number of places to make messes.   Although it seems that having a large home also gives you more space to store things out of children’s reach, it also provides more space for children to make messes, so the size of the home, h, is weighted a little, by dividing the square footage in half.  Researchers are trying to determine, how much the number of bathrooms in a home effect the overall cleanliness.  While it seems that perhaps having more bathrooms would increase messiness, by providing more places where excrement is collected and removed from the home, increasing the chances that access to water and the lack of practice many young children have at not getting urine and feces on the apparati in the bathroom in increasing the number of messes made.  However, they also make it more likely that the youngest of the children who use said facilities would have an easier time making it instead of using the rug to collect urine samples and make feces art.  The slob factor, s, is a constant and changes from person to person, depending on how many messes and how often you make these messes.  These have been determined for several subjects as individuals or as what will be referred to as “co-habitants”, meaning the people, pets, etc. that reside in a home together. 

This study focused mainly on the effects of the number of children in the home and the mess levels and the equation is only good for a home that has children.  It is trivial to show that even in homes where no children exist, messes still occur, although this equation predicts otherwise.  Mess levels are not a measure of how messy the house is at any given time, but a measure of how many messes are made during the day.  A home can appear immaculate because of the determination of the home managers or other cleaning help, even though the number of messes made in a day is high.  Further studies are needed to determine the effects of other factors on the mess levels of the home.