She makes a mess wherever she goes. She does arts and crafts all the time and I’ve always got paper, glitter and crayons scattered around the house. I spend all of my days telling her she has to clean up when she’s done.
Her room is a pigsty. She doesn’t put her laundry away, we can’t tell what socks are clean and what’s dirty. Toys are shoved in every corner available. Scraps of paper are all over the floor. At any given time, I can find 5 empty glasses and 3 empty dishes in her room. It’s driving me batty.
Every day we have an argument about cleaning her room. I’m tired of it.
I have to admit I’m a slob, too. My mother’s a neat freak, which doesn’t make life easy, and at the moment I’m revising so there’s books everywhere. That’s as well as clothes, particularly socks, and scribbled-on sheets of paper all over the place, which is usual.
But, IMHO, your daughter sounds messier than me. And that’s saying something.
An idea, which you may or may not have tried - how about stopping the arguments, and stopping doing any tidying for her? Just let it get messier and messier until she can’t open the door to get out, finally cracks and tidies it for herself.
I’ll admit that if that doesn’t work, then there’s problems. But I wouldn’t leave it as it is, otherwise food will start to go off in her room and if you can’t find it, ewww. It’s happened to me, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
My two boys (9 and 7) keep their room a mess. While we do overlook it most of the time, eventually it comes to the point where we tell them that they’ve got to straigten it up.
My son is a slob to this day. I’m talking his room needed to be fucking condemned. I don’t know the answer. Ground her from all activities until her room is clean. That means TV, phone, computer, going out, everything. Although I tried that and it didn’t work for long.
I used to be a complete and total slob and it drove my mother bonkers. The rule in our house was that no guests were allowed in messy rooms. I think my mother was too embarrassed and felt that my mess was a reflection of her.
Well, my parents had some friends over one night (I was then a teenager) and the woman wanted to say “hi” to me. In what must have been the most difficult thing my mother EVER did, my mom didn’t call me to come down and say hello but told this woman to go visit me in my room.
I will never forget her coming into my room with dirty plates, underwear strewn over everything, if I had a cat, I’m sure there would have been dried cat puke on the floor, you get the idea. We had a casual conversation and she left. It sticks with me to this day – my embarrassment. I did make MORE of an effort after that, although I never got to be great. I guess my point is that I think it’s one of those things that I had to come to terms with on my own and all my mom’s badgering did was make us bicker constantly about an issue.
I agree with CuriousCanuck. Our rule is “No food in bedrooms” - period. So the dirty dishes aren’t an issue here, but the laundry is.
I will have to crack down soon, though. Our house will go on the market after the first of the year and tidiness will become a major issue. Under normal circumstances, however, as long as it’s not a health threat, just pick your battles and let your kids be messy in their rooms. They may actually decide it’s worth the effort to clean up once in a while, after you leave it to them to choose. Or not. Either way, you take charge and let go.
Well, I’ll check in as the unreasonable tyrant parent who expects -make that demands - that the kids keep their rooms reasonably clean and neat. Clothes are hung up or folded in drawers. Piles on surfaces should be reasonably neat and not in fear of toppling. A majority of the floor surface should be visible.
Yes, it is their room, but they occupy it at the homeowners’ (my wife and I) leisure. And we have every right to impose certain restrictions on their use and occupancy.
We also have paid for the majority of their clothes and belongings, so we require that they maintain them responsibly.
And, we require that they look relatively decent when they leave the house. Which means their clothes need not be perfectly pressed, but neither are they wrinkled as tho they had been in a heap in the corner.
Moreover, I feel there are important lessons a kid can learn from having to consistently take care of their possessions. The understanding that having nice things and living in a nice space imposes the obligation to take care of them. Personally, I am not convinced of the benefits resulting from allowing a kid to be a slob.
The basic message that seems effective in our house is, “As long as you keep your room relatively neat and clean, we won’t have any reason to go thru your drawers and closets putting things away.”
I’m with Dinsdale on this one. The only thing I let slide is bed making. I never understood why I had to make my bed when I was a kid so I let Nathan (the 8 yr old) get away with not making it.
:eek: Apparently, we have the same exact kid!! My daughter’s room drives me nuts too. And even if she DOES clean it, it’ll be just as messy within a day.
I’ve learned to compromise though. As long as she keep the room clean enough to avoid having OSHA warning stickers on the door and clean enough so she can actually walk across the floor to the bed as opposed to having to leap over the ocean of stuff no the floor, then I’m okay with it.
Oh, and I learned this the hard way: Glitter is pure evil stuffed in a tiny plastic bottle. I think that those little bottles can hold approximately 2 tons of the stuff and it goes EVERYWHERE, and is nearly impossible to clean up on carpet.
Glitter is banned in our house.
What worked for our son, after a fashion, was to get a big box. Everything on the floor went into the box.
Then the box went into the basement and stayed there.
If he wanted more clothes, or his books, or his video game controllers, he had to go down to the basement, dig through the box to find them, and bring them back to his room.
Each weekend we went back into his room with another big box.
Each weekend there was less and less in it when we came out.
My daughter, on the other hand, is something of a neatness freak. She has her stuffed animals sorted out by type, size, color, name, whatever.
Some parents go too far. Nothing was allowed out of place in my room. The bed always had to be made – but without any wrinkles in any of the sheets and both sides had to be even. Once a week I had to move my bed out from the wall to clean behind it.
When I escaped, I became a total slob.
I say let them have their space, but have them do a thorough cleanup every month or so.
I’m a slob. I’d go for a compromise: no dirty dishes or food in the room and dirty clothes have to be separate from clean ones. And whenever you’re expecting company, the room has to be thoroughly cleaned.
Food is only allowed in the kitchen or possibly the living room if we have guests or it is a family movie.
Having grown up with a brother who made the houses on COPS looks like surgical wards and witnessed first hand ANTS in every pile on the floor, I can say I was sufficently creeped out for the rest of my life.
I’m really confused at the number of folk suggesting that there is nothing they can do to get their kids to clean up their rooms. I don’t understand this manner of parental helplessness (assuming no specific diagnosable pathology on behalf of the kid).
What can I do? A hell of a fucking lot! At least for any kid under majority. Do you provide food, housing, clothing, possessions, transportation, etc.? Are there ANY areas in which your requests/expectations MUST be accomodated or else there will be repercussions?
And realize that things didn’t get to this point overnight. Maybe now you are paying the price of countless prior decisions.
If they are of age and don’t wish to respect your wishes, kick their asses out so they can live on their own by whatever rules they want.
Jesus fuck! If you can’t get your kids to show respect for your rules and your property inside the four walls of your home, what chance in hell do you have of your kids acting in accordance with your wishes, or learning any lessons you wish to impart, when they are out of your sight?
I encounter variations oof this type of “parental helplessness” all of the time, and I just don’t understand it. And I certainly don’t sympathize with it.
That’s a bit extreme. My parents were much like you are (and I think you’re an excellent dad from reading your posts), but keeping my room clean was an exercise in frustration. I grew up knowing right from wrong, taking responsibility for my actions, and treating others with respect, but there were two areas in which I thoroughly disagreed with my parents: how clean a room should be, and what time I should wake up on a Saturday or during the summer. They simply couldn’t convince me that their point of view was correct.
It is true that there are plenty of things a parent can do to force a (younger) child to get their rooms clean. However, there are numerous other factors involved.
The bottom line is that each kid is different and has different needs. For some kids, being a slob is not as bad as other habits that thier parents want to break them of.
It’s not a matter of “parental helplesness.” It’s a matter of learning to pick your battles with your kids. You can’t (and shouldn’t) fight over every issue. You have to learn to pick the important issues to make your stand on and let other go, to varying degrees. It could very well be (as is the case with my own kids) that there are other areas of their lives that are far more important to me than the state of cleanliness in their rooms, and so, I’d rather exert my energy and influence with them in those areas rather than in this one.
Of course, however, there does come the point when the line gets crossed and then they do have to clean up.
