In the course of the interview, this participant informed me of a rather demeaning incident in which authorities from New Brunswick Housing had come by to inspect and had given her a warning about cleaning her premises. As she described, nobody had bothered to discuss with her the reasons for the state of her home. They merely arrived and, in a rather humiliating manner, ordered an immediate clean-up. In my follow-up visits to this home, the cleanliness and organization of the home had improved.

In another home, the parents had also been informed that they needed to have higher standards for cleanliness or they would be asked to move out. Again, nobody had felt it was necessary to discuss the reasons for the state of the home at the time of the inspection. The parents disclosed to me that their son had recently had surgery, leaving them too tired and stressed to maintain or improve the state of cleanliness of their home. Furthermore, some of these participants seemed to have a difficult time complying with these expectations; they were unable to understand why they failed to meet the standards set by the social worker. In retrospect, this seems plausible. For example, when this woman spoke about her childhood, she described conditions where rodents were not exterminated. She recalled "I don't remember much from 0 to 6 [years of age], other then from 0 to 6, I remember…going into my bedroom it was – it was bedtime and I'd see rats, I remember seeing rats in my bedroom."

In their initial attempt to comply with the request for cleaning their home, one family sponge-painted the living room walls. It was not until the social worker had told them they would need to mop and vacuum their floors and clean the kitchen counters and cupboards with a cleanser that they seemed to know what tasks had to be done. Once these were understood, they willingly completed them.