Zev, I completely disagree. It IS a matter of “parental helplesness”. I pick my battles with my son, but I also set limits as to what we can and will battle about. There are some things that just are not negotiable. Period. And keeping one’s room relatively neat - no not surgical ward neat, but picked up - is one of them. End of story. I’m the grown up here - he’s the 13 year old. And I’m the boss. Period. And for a kid who has consistently maintained an A or A- average scholastically since he started SCHOOL, has plenty of friends, is on the jr. high tennis team and in chess club, it doesn’t seem to have harmed him any. (Ok, I’ll stop bragging on him - but I’m one proud mom!)
And that’s fine. If that’s one of the areas where you want to make your stand; if that is something that is that important to you as a parent, then that’s OK, hold your ground on that issue. But not all of us choose to make that big a deal over it; and it’s not because we feel “helpless” before our kids.
Hey, if your kid keeps his room neat and has good grades and good friends and is a good kid, you deserve to brag.
Let her room be a mess, as long as you can close the door, you don’t have to look at it. Have her put her own clothes away, make her come out of her room to eat, (so as to ensure no dishes get taken in.) Have her pick up when she is doing crafty projects else where in the house. If she has to pick up at the dining room table, she may start to eventually pick up after herself in her room. ( but don’t count on it )
Speaking as a former messy kid, one thing that got me to keep my room only semi-messy was my grandmother, (not my mom, you’ll notice) who bought me a nice new dresser on the condition that I keep the room reasonably clean. I then felt that I should keep my word to someone as nice as she is. But that fact is that my standards were different than my parents’, so what I considered ‘neat’ was probably not what they did. It wasn’t a biohazard, though, and since it was my room, they pretty much let me keep it the way I wanted. Having exchange students sharing my room every so often helped, too.
Also, it’s good to declutter the room every once in a while, so that there just isn’t as much stuff to be messy with. That helped my younger sister (inheritor of four older kids’ worth of stuff) a lot. Her room is still hideous, but not as much.
My daughter is only two so keeping her room clean falls to me. I tend to be somewhat more tolerant of toys and clutter than most of the posters here. We do major cleaning every weekend and a minor clean Wednesday evening (trash night) but during the week a lot of things slide… I don’t freak about toys out overnight or a couple of dishes in the sink until morning.
One point that I haven’t seen made yet was the constant battle I waged with my parents when I was a kid. I’m not saying ANYONE’s house is like this … just speaking from experience.
My parent’s house was a pigsty. You did not walk through rooms… you waded. The only time my parents cleaned was when people were coming over. Then everything would be tossed in bags and thrown upstairs out of sight so the main floor looked livable. Beds were made when the sheets were washed. Sheets were washed when something catastrophic happened in a bedroom that required washing (sick child for example) Dishes were washed when there were no more clean dishes left. Laundry (which became my job when I was about 9 – I tried to keep up but they employed the tactic of putting out no laundry for a week and then putting out everything and bitching it wasn’t done fast enough) usually piled up in the bathroom to the point where you could not shut the bathroom door. The other “hamper” was the hallway upstairs … It was often almost impossible for me to enter/leave my room (the last in the hall) because of the laundry and other garbage piled here.
Now that you got some idea of the day to day living conditions… my parents harped on me for not having a clean room. :eek:
Um why did I have to live up to standards no one else had to heed? My younger brother (the one who never had to do a single chore) never cleaned his room. They never bothered to have him do anything! (Yes I am still bitter - mostly because my mom always wants sympathy regarding said brother)
Now I doubt anyone here is living in that kind of squalor but the point is … make sure you are fastidious about anything you want your kids to do also. And if you have more than one kid… make sure they all understand what your minimum requirements are… janie is a neat freak great! Don’t punish jimmy for not being one as long as he meets the standards you set.
To answer the OP I’ll be happy if her laundry makes it to the hamper and her stuff ends up in her room instead of the living room in a moderately organized fashion and definitely no food in the bedrooms!
I believe a bed room and any other room must be kept Clean Hygenic all the time, without exception. This is worth fighting for, so no more dirty plates, used glasses, dirty underwear left arround.
On the other hand Clean Tidy is just a subjective requirement. A kid’s bed room is tidy enough if it is possible to get the kid into bed, anything else is just a bonus and not worth fighting over. Maybe just introduce a once a week trash throw out regime, where kid gets a trash bag to fill with no longer wanted stuff.
Then again I am not a parent, just an untidy ex-kid.
Yes, having a clean room is generally better. But in some ways people have to learn this for themselves. If you can get your kid to clean the room great, but if not, then IMHO make ground rules that make your life tolerable (e.g. no food left in there, washing in one place, etc) and leave him to it.
Yes, you have the right to make him clean the room if you want, but if you can’t persuade him why it’s good, then forcing him’ll just make him resentfull…
For clothes on the floor, have a laundry day. Set one day a week (or 2 days a month) where the child picks up everything off the floor clean or not and washes and dries them the folds and put away. This day is specifically for this task and nothing else. No activities whatsoever until this chore is done. Wheile they are waiting for the machine they can fix and tidy up the room.
Compliment them at the end of the day for whatever they did even if its incomplete. Praise the achievments and let the failures pass. Do this constantly and vigilantly and eventually they will develop the skills to do it on their own …when they feel like it.
I have 2 grown daughters. One (the older) is far neater than I am and, like her father, is also better at cleaning, interior decoration, all that sort of thing. The younger is like me – even when we do “clean” a room, it never looks quite right somehow.
So I could never be too fanatical about tidiness.
One rule I did have for both when they were growing up was no food or beverages in the bedroom. This was not hard to enforce once they understood that if you have food crumbs or empty beverage containers around, bugs will get in there. EEEEEWWW. Nasty, creepy ants and whatnot. Look at that, something not wiped up on the sink or the floor – look at all the ants! Good thing that’s not in your room, or in your bed…
As far as clothing, most girls past a certain age do not want to look like slobs. Their schoolmates will make fun of them if they go about in dirty, wrinkled clothing. So: If you want clean clothes you have to put them in the hamper when dirty and put them away when they are given back to you clean and folded. Furthermore, when you are old enough to reach the washing machine and use it safely, you can do the laundry, too. Your reward for doing laundry is: You get to have clean clothes to wear!
I’m siding with the “pick your battles” crew on this one, as well as the “clean hygienic is a must; clean tidy can slide” folks. While I think that dirty dishes, food scraps, and soiled laundry are definitely unacceptable, I’m willing to let clutter and mess slide. Of course, Whatsit Jr. is only 16 months old and doesn’t even have his own room, so this isn’t an issue yet, but that’s my general philosophy.
I do like Ethilrist’s box-in-the-basement strategy, and may well employ it if conditions in Whatsit Jr.'s room ever warrant it.
Here is the situation from the POV of a messy daughter:
My parents constantly nag me about the state of my room. They won’t let me leave the house until it’s clean. However, I think that it needs to be considered that there is so much crap that I could be doing that I am not. I don’t drink. I hate being around smokers, much less smoking. I think drugs are stupid. I’m not a slut. Parents will always find something to be upset about; it almost makes us good kids want to at least give them a reason to do so.
I can’t imagine having dirty laundry in my room. And dirty dishes…that’s beyond comprehension.
I put my dirty clothes down the laundry chute and never have food in my room. I have piles of books on the floor and some clothes (sweaters and such) on my chair, but I can walk to my bed and my windows with no trouble.
The same is true for all my friends, at least those whose rooms I’ve seen.
My parents don’t generally bother me about my room, because they don’t ever go in there, and besides, their room is not the tidiest place in the house, either. (My dad dumps his dirty shirts on the floor, and there’s huge dust bunnies all over the place. My room is dust bunny and dirty laundry free.)
Now, my 9 year old brother, on the other hand, generally gets bothered more about his room than me, because my parents go in there to tuck him into bed and such, and because sometimes they can’t reach the bed because of all the books and clothes and toys all over the floor.
When I was a kid, and up until I moved out, my room would be in a constant state of clutter. I had school, band, dance lessons, and work so when I got home, the last thing I cared about was a clean room.
I reached a compromise with my mom. I would not leave dishes in my room, I would put my clean clothes in a basket, and dirty ones in a hamper. Whatever else was on the floor, well, that was my problem.
Mom would suggest that I might break things by leaving them all over the floor, and after I broke my precious cd player by stepping on it, I started cleaning up a little more. By the time I moved out, that room was spotless. It took me like, 8 years to get to that point, but I did it.
So, because you aren’t a complete slut, aren’t stoned, and aren’t in juvenile detention, that should be enough? How about setting some higher standards for yourself? Why not strive to be better than just not in jail?
I was a messy kid (who’da thunk I’d become an obsessively tidy adult?) and my mother employed a version of Ethilrist’s box strategy. She’d go through with a garbage bag and I’d have to earn the stuff back by keeping my room clean for at least a week AND not leave my things lying around the house. This worked until I was about twelve, and then I didn’t have “toys” or other things laying around, just clothes. So my mother stopped washing the clothes that weren’t in my hamper. Trust me, a clothes-conscious twelve-year-old didn’t like the prospect of not having clean clothes OR doing the laundry herself.
IANAP, but IMHO many kids just go through messy phases. Like I said, I ended up being a “oh-my-gosh-my-towel-is-hanging-crookedly-I-must-fix-it-now” type of person once I got into my late teens. One thing I think you MUST do that may not be obvious is to set a good example. The reason I grew out of my slobby phase is because my mother is also a very neat person. Most of the slobs my age that I know come from homes that the parents don’t keep straightened. Hopefully that will help out in the long term, along with some more drastic measures for the time being.
If she doesn’t already have one, get your kid a hamper for her room. Then she can pile her clean or still-wearable clothes in one place and toss the dirty stuff in her hamper. On laundry day, collect it (or have her do it - whichever is the norm in your house). This is what I do, and it works really well for me. I don’t always take the time to fold/hang up clothes (mostly laziness, but I also have an awkward closet) but at least I always know what is clean and what is dirty based on where it is. Actually, I have two hampers going now - one with clean clothes out of the dryer yesterday and the other is being refilled with dirty clothes. Works well enough for me.
Buy her some storage units or boxes or some sort of system that will allow her to organize her craft things. Not quite the same situation, but I have so much clutter at my job (I share lab and desk space) that the only way to keep me semi-organised was to get some containers and a desk-top file holder to keep everything straight. Even then, it gets really cluttered, but at least it looks better than the piles of stuff I’d have otherwise.
I agree with the no food in the bedroom thing, if she can’t manage to keep it clean. At the least, perhaps a compromise of “only one plate and glass in there at a time” will work, since it would require that she return a dirty one in order to get a new plate of food/drink. If that doesn’t work, then try the zero tolerance rule.
My dad and I always had very different ideas of what constituted “clean”. I get the impression that your daughter is a teenager, and if she’s anything like me, the last thing on her mind is “a decently clean living space”. She needs a space that’s HERS, but her priorities are also much more likely to be elsewhere - friends, clothes, music, boys, etc. She just doesn’t see the world the same way you do. I suppose I’m heading towards the “pick your battles” comment - even now when I go home to visit, even over a short weekend my room will become a mess, but my dad has learned to just not comment on it, because at the least I will clean it up before I leave, so as not to put the burden on him.
I was a messy kid and it was because I just didn’t have enough space and proper storage in my tiny room. I wanted to be tidy to please myself and my parents, but it was truly impossible to keep my room looking neat for more than a couple of hours. Once I was old enough to get proper boxes, and shelves installed, a great deal of the mess was gone. WalMart and other such places sell inexpensive clear storage boxes that could help your daughter.
I’ll also chime in to say that food in bedrooms was an extreme no-no in my house, same for not putting clean clothes away. It helped that every saturday we were required to clean our rooms thoroughly. We knew it was coming, we knew it was non-negotiable, so we didn’t even try to turn it into a battle. Good luck and yay! for having her do arts and crafts.
Kids have to learn to take care of themselves someday, so they need to experience the consequences of their own decisions. If you make ALL their decisions for them, they won’t learn.
As others have said, demand that the room stay sanitary, that the house stay undamaged (they pay for what they damage), and that the mess stay out of your sight. Then let them experience the effects of their own choices.
Naturally, there should be punishments for letting their messiness interfere with YOUR life, but if they’re too lazy to take care of their things, they get to find out what it’s like to live with lost or broken possessions.
They learn valuable life lessons, without you having to be the “bad guy”.
