A lot of people think of hoarding as something extreme – a home crammed to the ceiling with possessions. But it tends to start gradually, and research has found it can begin in adolescence or even childhood.

The information people have about it often comes from documentaries about severe cases, focusing on overflowing piles of possessions. But this narrow view of what hoarding is means people often don’t get help until the behaviour is devastating their lives.

Psychologists still don’t fully understand why people hoard. It was only as recently as 2013 that hoarding disorder was added to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a guide used by clinicians in the US.

Early intervention could make a life-changing difference to people who struggle with hoarding behaviour, their families and the communities they live in. It could also help children with hoarding tendencies to learn how to manage their possessions.

It can start from childhood

Participants in retrospective studies of adults found the median age hoarding behaviour began was 11-15.

As part of my PhD research, I interviewed several people with hoarding behaviour who described attachments to possessions and difficulty in discarding them from childhood.

Some participants said hoarding tendencies and behaviour had either begun, or became more difficult to manage, when they started university.

One participant felt his hoarding difficulties started when he left university. He said the responsibility that came with “the end of … student accounts” led to trouble discarding things. This was not something my PhD team and I had heard of before.

Some of our participants talked about how, in childhood, their families had encouraged them to discard possessions, or had discarded them for them. This was distressing for several reasons, including the emotional attachment they had formed to these possessions.

Previous research has suggested that when children exhibit hoarding tendencies, parents may help to keep them in check. Parents may also control the child’s living space by tidying or discarding possessions for them, although the latter may make hoarding tendencies worse.

One of the hallmarks of hoarding is that the attachments to possessions can be quite similar to those that non-hoarders form, but they’re stronger and related to a wider range of things. This causes attachments to things that others would see as having little or no value. There’s always a use, a story, an emotion or a memory attached to a possession for someone who hoards.

If we want to understand how best to help people with hoarding tendencies, we need more studies into hoarding during childhood so we can understand why it is so much harder for some children to organise and discard things.