Want to spend some time thinking about who your family is, and how the way you live reflects the way you really want to live, as opposed to the life that you’ve settled into, somehow, without much thought?

Then you may want to get a copy of “Life at Home in the 21st Century,” an anthropological look at middle class American families — or you may just want to take a look at your refrigerator door.

“Life at Home in the 21st Century” is the first book to come out of the  research in which the  Center on Everyday Lives of Families at the University of California, Los Angeles, followed 32 dual-income families with young children for, among other things, some 1,400 hours of videotaped interactions. This is the research that gave us the phrase (from author and researcher Anthony P. Graesch) “the very purest form of birth control ever devised,” and the comparison between the 5-year-old Amazon child who hauls logs and works the harvest while the 8-year-old American kid orders Dad to tie his shoe.

It’s a book focused on how we live within our homes — on “material saturation” and the way we create spaces, like serene master bedrooms and backyard patios, and yet spend all of our time bottled up in our kitchens and at our computers. And it’s about the way the spaces we live in reflect our lives, which brings us to the doors of our fridges.

Most families, say the authors, have “rather dense and layered assemblages of ephemera on the refrigerator.”

One of the more intriguing phenomena we have noted is a tendency for high counts of objects on refrigerator panels to co-occur with large numbers of objects in the house as a whole. Put another way, a family’s tolerance for a “messy” refrigerator may be associated with a fairly relaxed attitude about high density or clutter in public rooms of the house. Perhaps a place as seemingly unassuming as the refrigerator signals overall family tendencies regarding consumerism and household organization.

Feeling a bit like a butterfly pinned to a card yet? Not only does the refrigerator in my house “signal” our clutter, it also records my futile struggles against it. What does it say about the degree to which “ephemera” has taken over our home that I have tried — and failed — to organize the front of our fridge?

First, there were the plastic magnetic picture frames. Nothing, I declared, belonged on the fridge except neatly in a frame, at right angles to everything else. One held a rotating cast of children’s art; another, a list of emergency phone numbers. It was the equivalent of stacking the piles on your desk. Remnants of that effort can still be seen in the picture (I can’t tell you how hard it was to keep from straightening things before I took it, but I resisted), along with last spring’s “only magnets with sentimental value, or clips, or useful phone numbers” purge and the addition of new magnetic frames.

My refrigerator door is organizational challenge and defeat on a single surface. Failed attempts to organize too much stuff by buying more stuff. Efforts to involve others (the “no leftovers” message is for the babysitter), lists, calendars: all meant to make things easier, better, more pleasant. The result is semi-organized, and a reflection not just of our life of semi-controlled chaos but of the duality of emotions that surround it.

Material things, from magnets to toys to gadgets, cost far less in adjusted dollars than they ever did before, while time remains nearly as tightly budgeted as it ever was. The newest new thing is easy to get. Time to take care of the old thing, to put it away or give it away or even throw it away, is harder to come by, even when it’s as dumb as a refrigerator magnet.

That mentality — the desire to buy a solution, or just treat yourself to a little material reward, instead of taking the time to do something more difficult or thoughtful, is reflected across many of our houses, including mine. It’s in our crowded playrooms, our overstuffed closets, and even in our so-busy schedules. And it’s apparently displayed prominently on our fridges.

Don’t think something so “seemingly unassuming” as the front of our refrigerators can really say something about a large slice of our society? The average family in the study had 55 objects on their fridge surface. I had 53. (The study author Dr. Graesch admits to 66 magnets alone.)

It looks like our refrigerators (and these researchers) have our number.

What’s on your refrigerator door?

Contact KJ Dell’Antonia at:

kj.dellantonia@nytimes.com

 

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