DaToad:
I’ve got a friend whose mom is like that.
He’s on anti-depressants now. Hope that stops him from self-medicating.
Jess, I do see your point; you don’t mention what sex your other kids are, but if they all share in their chores equally, I don’t have any beef with your system. You just happened to remind me of my mother, who has raised a 27-year-old slob who has to be reminded to shower. And never washes his sheets. And keeps old food cartons in his car until they begin to decompose and rot and attract bugs. And never does any laundry, as far as I can tell; his clothes can stand on their own, they’re so stiff with filth.
And these are just the things I know about from what my mother’s mentioned and what I remember; I’ve never been to any apartment of his. God only knows how he lived when he went away to college!
And while my brother is, I’ll admit, a very extreme case, I do think that a lot of his behavior stems from a childish idea that he shouldn’t be required to clean up after himself, b/c no one ever made him do it. “Cleaning is for girls” type of thing. My mother wails that she “didn’t raise him this way!” but she always treated him like she treated my dad…as one of The Men who should be pampered and taken care of and whatnot. Well, you know, my dad paid the rent; I don’t think my brother, or any child of either sex, should be in the same category. 
But maybe someday he’ll fall in love with a girl and start doing some laundry.
Stranger things have happened.
My mom found some of my “magazines” when I was a kid. She didn’t particularly like them, but she grudgingly let it pass.
A few years later, when I was in college, I came home one weekend with a new girlfriend. When we went to bed that night, we found (much to my embarrassment) that my mother had so kindly placed my stack of mags under the pillows.
My mom has a strange sense of humor.
He showers twice a day? :eek: Consider yourself lucky. I know sixteen year old boys who shower like once a week.
Just MHO, but I don’t think that’s the height of cool.
Audrey my other child is a girl, a little less than a year younger than Nick. They do have more or less equal in-house responsibilities, although Nick gets stuck with more outside chores. You see, our situation is complicated by the fact that my daughter is disabled and walks with crutches so she can’t mow the lawn, chop wood or take out the garbage. If there’s painting or weeding to be done, we put her on that, but usually she does very little outside. So from the male-female chore split perspective, I guess Nick’s getting the shaft. Doe does a much better job of keeping up her chores than Nick does, though. Her bedroom and bathroom are always spotless. She doesn’t do her own laundry any more than Nick does, but I don’t put her clothes away for her – she does that herself and quite quickly, too. If I put a pile from one load in her room, they’ll be put away long before the next load is finished. She makes her own lunch and breakfast, too. Nick just grabs a banana or an apple and a power bar, or scrounges for enough change to buy lunch at school. I’m not sure how Nick will work out as grownup… he’ll probably start out pretty slobby and then slowly realize that it’s nicer to be neat – at least that’s how it worked out with me and my siblings and we were raised similarly to how I’m raising mine.
Rilchiam, I take your point, but we have a pretty open relationship. When he found the note, he shouted, “Ma! Godammit! That’s not funny!”
“Really? I thought it was. Put it away next time instead of stuffing it under your bed.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Its really easy to assume that just because a child wasn’t made to do something themself when they were young, they will be inept and incapable of it later in life. I believe this is a misconception.
I’ve had friends whose parents raised them to be neat freaks at home, but when they moved out, they became total slobs.
And there are people like me, who spent the better part of their life having their laundry done for them, but are perfectly competent doing it themselves if need be.
Morrigoon, I doubt that being required to keep your room clean and do basic housekeeping would drive someone into depression to the point of needing medication. However, I agree with you that medically sponsored meds is better than self prescribed.
And by the way, I didn’t mess with their stuff, I just made sure the place wasn’t a stye. The bathroom that they shared was also the bathroom that guests had to use, so it was necessary to keep it clean. My older son was pretty neat, but the younger son was basically a slob, so I always had to check on him. My daughter was a neat-freak, but I checked on all of them equally. No favorites!
After my younger son (the slob) moved out, and into an apartment with one of his buddies, guess what? Yeah, he turned into me. He couldn’t stand that his friend was a slob.
They all turned out OK. No psychosis, neurosis, phobias, or obsessions. They are all successful in their careers, and both of the boys are good husbands and fathers. The boys are now 30 and 28, and my daughter is 24.
I found the best idea, in my misspent youth, was to find where Dad kept his. 
Even if your tastes in porn^^^^erotica are different, you can mix your top choices in there. What’s he gonna do, eh?
[geezer]Back in my day, we didn’t have Usenet and Kazaa, or password protected directories! We had to get our jollies from magazines and videos, and find a way to hide 'em from our moms! And we liked it!!![/geezer]
My boyfriend (17 years old) had the entire floor of his room covered in clothes and other random stuff the other day. The only way he could get into his room was to climb over the end of the bed, which was by the door.
The Tzeroling is 9. She has a couple friends that drop by to play on a regular basis, none of whom seem to be fazed by the messy room. Any boyfriends start dropping by regularly, they gotta go through Mama first, and I get what’s left.
So thanks fer the advice, but I don’t think it’ll work much.
Jess, I can’t believe you cleaned FOR him…
If he was mine, he’d be in there pronto cleaning up!!!
Bah. Luxury!
At least you had a house. We got evicted and had to go live in a lake. After my father drowned in his sleep one night, I became the laundry man: Every night, before I went to sleep standing up in 4 feet of water, I had to balance everyone’s clothes on my head in a barrel, so they’d be dry in the morning. We couldn’t leave our clothes on the shore because the deer would eat them, or the boaters would steal them.
And every morning, I’d have to trudge out of the lake buck naked, change into my clothes on the boat launch (while the boaters and deer pointed and laughed), build a raft out of reeds, discarded life vests, and rusty nails, and paddle 20 miles to school, through piranha infested waters and the foulest bogs this side of Tacoma. It wasn’t even a real school, it was an accounting firm that gave me 1040 forms as “assignments”, but I didn’t find that out until the IRS S.W.A.T. team raided my classroom.
When I got home, I had to rub dirt on my piranha wounds, then clean all the algae off the surface of the lake with my tongue, while my brothers cleaned the bottom of the lake with theirs. They sometimes found an old Playboy down there on the murky bottom, but I had to settle for watching fish spawn, pretending they were mermaids. When my mom found out, she sent me to bed without even a handful of lake water.
Ay, times were tough back then. But you try and tell the young people today that… and they won’t believe you.
We do it especially for out mothers. (Happy Mothers Day, btw ;))
I am an only child and only live with my Mom. Yes, I probably am spoiled but I’m not one of them damn McLean kids who get a Jag or BMW for Christmas and/or your 16th birthday gift. So my mom and I worked something out. She’ll wash and dry the clothes, but I would have to take them down 3 flights of stairs from my room the basement, sort them out, take them back upstairs, and put them away. It works out well I guess, and at times gasp I do my own laundry.
BTW Olentzero, I was going to inquire about the age of your step-daughter (notice location) but I prefer NOT to be a cradle robber.