Your behavior is way out of line. Your son and his wife seem like they tried to be polite about it and you’ve not taken the hint. Style and art taste are VERY personal. Back off. Why don’t you try and get to know your DIL better so that in the future, you’ll know what she likes.

And stop pushing your husband’s art on people, generally speaking. It’s great to be a supportive wife, but you sound like you are really imposing on people.

Some of the “so much stuff” problem is that stuff would last forever and get passed down and was always wanted, and that’s changed. Also that people are living longer and don’t pass down at the appropriate time. My grandmother left two sets of “good” dishes, one was her wedding set and one was from her own mother. One set was for each of her daughters. Well by the time they got passed down, my mom was in her 60s and already had two sets of her own. AND my sister and I both have our sets that we got as wedding gifts. So there are these two sets of Royal Doulton dishes just sitting around that no one wants/needs. Not to mention that the style used to be considered “timeless”, but isn’t anymore. Even if I needed dishes I probably wouldn’t take them.

And this is happening with everything. Furniture, jewellery, etc. Stuff that you used to hand down, and if jo one wanted it you could sell it for good money. Now you can’t even sell it because no one’s buying it. So it just sits around. People used to hang on to everything because it stayed usable for so long. There was always someone to take it or to buy it. That’s no longer the case though, so you have houses just collecting all this junk. My mom has some hoarding tendencies too that doesn’t help. But I can see she’s still got this idea of “leaving stuff” for the kids, without the realization that the stuff she’s leaving isn’t going to be useful to us. All I want is something sentimental. I don’t need an old-fashioned dining room set, no matter how much it was worth when it was bought.

In addition to what you said RR, I think the fact baby boomers grew up at a time when consumer goods suddenly become much more accessible had an impact.

They were raised by depression era parents who taught them the value of hanging onto stuff, but unlike their parents they grew up in a world were production of stuff got cheaper and cheaper and more plentiful.

So stuff accumulates, there’s more of it to be had but you were raised to hang onto it for dear life. Whereas my generation always grew up in a world with cheap stuff, and has never really known scarcity in the same way our grandparents did so we never felt an impulse to keep. And we feel like we’re drowning in stuff and always have been, so we’re developing an extinct to purge.

Although, check back with me in 30 years and see how much stuff I’ve got. Maybe I’ll be just like my parents.

Let’s see what she says. It would be a little bit of a road trip for you, but worth it, I’m sure!

The depression era parents who raised my wife and me basically taught hoarding, as did the early environmentalist movement. It was wrong, and in most cases a sin, to throw something away that somebody, somewhere could put to further use, so it had to be saved until that somebody could be found or you could find just the right place to drop it off, where it was assured of being put to further use. Even if it didn’t get much further use, at least you avoided the sin, by not throwing it away yourself. My in-laws also worried about fading memory, so retention of vast amounts of papers and books and magazines and college alum bulletins was a way of keeping the admission of senility at bay.

For those who grew up in an era of scarcity, passing along the ‘good’ family china, furniture, art, books is a way of passing along the wealth and sense of family continuity. We see this is politics. Older Americans want to hoard their homes and ‘wealth’, pushing to lower their generation’s share of taxes — and royally screwing their kids’ and grandkids’ generations in the process, in order to ‘drum roll’ — have the sense of personal accomplishment of leaving $/things to the younger generations, which the younger generations would have had for themselves, at a more appropriate time in their lives when it meant more to them and come with the sense of personal accomplishment, had their parents generation not used their political clout to totally screw over the younger generations economically. This allows older voters to feel good about themselves and their peers, vs the unsuccessful, indolent youth.