Just this.
You could be describing my son. Once a week or so, I show up in his room with a bin for dishes and a bag for trash. He separates everything and we are done for another week.
I decided that is not the battle I care about, unless he gets ants in his room I admit.
There’s a real mixed message between this response, and this portion of your original post:
Either you’re perfectly fine with him eating junk food like Pop Tarts, or you’re buying lunch meats and chicken nuggets and expecting him to eat those instead.
So I think you need to make sure there’s a clear expectation about what you’re really OK with him eating. If we’re picking up on a double-standard in a couple hours of posting, I imagine he’s feeling like there’s a lot of conflicting demands on him. Hiding trash can be the kind of stupid thing you do when a little fear and confusion get all muddled up in a teenage brain.
Could it also be a solution to invite him to go grocery shopping with you? Maybe even hand him $10 or $20 and let him make his own purchases? Let him check out at the register and pay on his own and you can meet him back at the car when you’re done with your shopping.
It might even be a good idea to make this a reward for getting his room clean now, and then keeping it clean in the future. Clothes off the floor? Trash taken out? Great, let’s go shopping.
Can’t I be both?
I’m fine with him eating the snack foods I buy within the context of him eating real food as well. I don’t think that’s any sort of bizarre or outlandish mixed message.
Make a sandwich, have some chips with it. Have some cookies later. This isn’t crazy thinking here.
Just as a random point, giving the kid a $20 and letting him shop isn’t going to cover much food, by teenage boy standards. That’s a couple of frozen pizzas and whatever brand of junk food he prefers. That’s like… a DAY’s worth of food.
I think I’d make it very clear that the rules have changed:
“Son, we do not mind you eating in your room. Here is the trash can. Once a week, you are to clean your room by emptying all the drawers and cubbies of trash and dishes, and take them out of the room. I will be in the room for the first few times to make sure you check everywhere for wrappers and dishes. Once you have shown that you get everything when you clean, you’re on your own, and I’ll check once a month. If you get bugs or ants in your room at any time, you have to pay for the exterminator, and we’ll go back to me helping you clean once a week.”
Expectations, consequences, done.
Now, good luck getting him to stick to it, so it’s going to be more work on the OP’s part to hold him to it, but that’s part of the joy of parenting, I hear.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the Pit thread I’ve written about my own stepson. He also hides trash in his room. It’s about #245 on the list of issues we have with him, as you can imagine if you’ve seen the thread.
I think the question you really have is–are there some serious issues at stake here, or is my kid just lazy? With our stepson there was a bit of both. I’m sure most of it was down to laziness, but for a while he was loading trash under his bed to obscure his stash. But there’s nothing in your OP that indicates anything to me other than typical teenage priorities being different from yours. Kids need a space where they can feel comfortable, and some people are just comfortable with more mess than others. Hell, my desk here is a mess and I’d have a difficult time working otherwise.
That’s not to say that Pop-Tart boxes under the bed are an ideal situation, but some people just can’t handle absolute neatness. Just give him a garbage can, thank him (not effusively but not sarcastically) when he fills it, and I think the situation will resolve itself.
So you’re not “perfectly fine” with Pop Tarts, as stated in your first post. Pop Tarts would only be acceptable as part of a snack with other foods, as you’ve clarified later.
So you do know precisely why your son is hiding the trash from snack foods - or you will know if you think about it.
I guess you just have to decide how important it is to control the foods he snacks on, and if you feel that it is important, then you need to work on a way to reward the behavior you want to see. (i.e. instead of snacking on Pop Tarts, you want to see him have a sandwich first and then the Pop Tarts). The trash problem will go away if you and he can get on the same page with the choice-of-snacks problem.
Wow, it’s like you were never a teenager, and never hung out with other teenaged boys, etc.
IMHO you’re making a big deal about nothing. He’s a teen boy, he’s messy in his room, he 100% normal. The best approach is to give him a trash can (don’t expect him to throw the trash in the can immediately, just don’t) and tell him in a gentle off-hand way, “hey, let’s make sure to get the trash out of the room every Thursday, alright?” Then he can pick it up on Thursday, put it in the trash can, and bring it out to the household trash. Don’t make a big deal about it. You will have to remind him on Thursday.
As for the food choices - teen boys don’t prepare food, even if it just means opening the package and nuking it for 5 minutes, or slapping lunchmeat between two slices of bread. They want food that they can eat the moment it enters their mind. Again, 100% normal.
You can be whatever you want, but your behavior (and perhaps lack of spousal agreement on this particular rule) is sending mixed messages to your son. Not on purpose, but from here it looks like you’re well on the way to creating a proto-hoarder and instilling lifelong food anxiety in your kid.
If you have a family dinner together every night, then you know he’s eating. You really need to stop sweating whether he’s eating sandwiches or cookies between meals. Give him a trash can and tell him that you don’t care if he eats in room, or what he eats in his room, as long as he bags it up on garbage day.
Well, the actual monetary amount is certainly negotiable, but I think one of the valuable side lessons would be to teach him to budget. To me, $20 sounds like an unreasonably large amount of money for snacks, but I wouldn’t be spending it on a pricey item like pizza. In fact, my teenage self was so frugal, I’d give up snacks to pocket the cash. (On the rare occasions that my parents gave us lunch money, I would skip lunch and keep the $3. If my brother and I skipped ten lunches each and pooled our money, that bought us a new video game. Or four used games.)
I’m also perfectly fine with him taking a shower but not “perfectly fine” with him staying in the shower until he drowns. I mean, if you’re trying to win some semantics argument, congratulations. If you’re trying to win common sense, I’m going to hold on to your award a little while longer.
As previously noted, I was once a teenage boy. One with a messy room, albeit not food waste.
I had no problem throwing something in the microwave for two minutes when I was 14 but maybe that was just me. Given the earlier option from my youth (put TV dinner in oven for 50 minutes), the idea of 2 minute food was quite the luxurious novelty.
Given that it’s apparently not as obvious as it should have been, talking about Pop-Tarts hasn’t been the sole conversation in the house about food. We, like I’d have guessed most families have (but maybe not), have had multiple conversations along the way about “real” food vs junk food, etc. Telling him that I’m fine with him eating Pop-Tarts was in the context of all these previous conversations (not to mention school programs, children’s television, etc).
So if kids don’t follow the rules, the solution is to change the rule? I don’t think Jophiel is being unreasonable asking the kid not to eat in his room.
Exactly. Sounds like he gets out of school and heads for his room to play some games. He doesn’t want to pause in the kitchen preparing food, which would probably create a mess, which he would get yelled at for. He wants to grab a bag of “Purina Teen Chow” to munch on while he is playing. When he is done with the bag he stuffs it under the bed and hopes everyone forgets it ever existed.
I’ve had some work stuff come up which is affecting my mood & posting so I’m going to back out of the thread for now and respond when I have some breathing room. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
I’m not trying to argue semantics. Let’s just leave it at this: from what you have said here, it appears to me that the trash problem is a result of your son’s belief that his preferences for snacking are not what you want them to be. Hiding the trash is at least partly an attempt to conceal what he’s eating.
Also, where he’s eating it.
That he hasn’t resorted to crumpling some garbage paper around his food wrappers and carrying it to the trashcan that way tells me he probably doesn’t have the deviousness for either a criminal or political career. Or it is just a matter of laziness.
Some rules are stupid in themselves. Others are stupid because they are either unenforced or unenforceable, due to outside circumstances. This one is the latter. The kid has time alone at home on weekdays, so they can’t be around to enforce this rule 24/7. Unless they want to put a padlock on the refrigerator and install security cameras in his room, he’s going to eat in his room. They can either change the rule to accommodate this, or choose this cross to die on. And really, it’s just not worth it.
Point taken. It wouldn’t be cool if the OP had other kids in the household who were trying to follow the “no eating in your room” rule, but I see his other kid is only three.
I’m late to this post, so I admit that most of this thread is tldr;
keeping that in mind here are my comments/thoughts.
Is there a “No food allowed in your room” rule? If not, I’m of the opinion that there should be. I don’t care how clean of a house you have; empty food containers attract critters from ants on up.
Can you see into the room when walking by doing normal house stuff (as opposed to the kid’s bedroom being in the basement)?
I ask because I had a no-food-in-your-room rule for my kids, and when they broke it, I took the door off the hinges for a while. hitting a kids privacy goes straight to the heart; and it takes all of 10 seconds to slide hinge pins out of a door. 