Friday, April 11, 2008

Are children of crime scene investigators compulsive cleaners?

Sherlock Holmes was arguably the first crime scene investigator who paid as much attention to detail as the people on the current TV shows glorifying the crime scene investigator. And he was fictional, as are the people being played by actors on the TV shows. But there are real life crime scene investigators, who are real people. So there are likely real children of the real life crime scene investigators. So are these real children compulsively neat?

Humans go through a variety of stages as they grow up. One of the typical stages is becoming contrary to their parents. Having different ideas, beliefs, goals, and ways of looking at the world is a way young humans find their own path in life. Some call this rebelling.

So if a young human is rebelling against their parents, and his or her parents are crime scene investigators, do they do everything they can to make sure their parents don't know what they're doing? Are these children compulsive cleaners who try to remove any trace of their actions, so their parents would have to work really hard to figure out what they've been doing?

Or are these children really messy? Do they effectively dare their parents to figure out what they are up to by leaving massive amounts of clues, some intentionally misleading, for their parents to find?

Sir Author Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, had his characters living in a set of rooms that were cleaned by their land-lady, Mrs. Hudson. In several stories she was miffed by the mess that Sherlock made of his rooms before he went out and left her to clean them. So this fictional character was not always fastidious himself, not worried that others would figure out what he was doing by examining the details of his life. But was this a reaction a rebellion by the author against all the attention to detail? Was the author making a mess in the story to push away from all that detailed examination of everything, even the smallest shred of evidence?

Is the desire to make a mess, and dare the overly detailed oriented people to figure out what you've been doing, a natural human desire? Or is the desire to be very clean to hide your movements, so no one can tell what you've been doing, a more natural response?

What do children of crime scene investigators do?

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