moominmolly | Clean your room!

We make them clean before the cleaners come or company, not every day. Toys/stuff off the floor and on shelves. Any LEGOs on the floor are confiscated. Pillow and blankets on beds/couches as appropriate. It's taken and long time, but now at 6&7, they can do that much mostly independently. We have to comes through periodically and clean out the shelves, etc. They're still not capable of that.

Smiles' room: I clean it. When it gets ridiculous or we're going to have a lot of people over I spend about an hour sorting all the toys on the floor. On good days she doesn't interfere. On bad days I have to try to give her things to distract her so I can stay ahead of her.

She mostly cooperates with this because her room is the place for small toys AND active play, so she understands that if she is having a playdate she'll want to have a place to jump and spin and run around.

The toys in the common space: We do a lot of five minute cleanups before things -- usually before things she wants to do. Anything left out at the end of the five minute cleanup gets tossed in a box for later. We also try to implement putting away a game (or puzzle) before getting out a second one. How much I help her depends on how big the mess is and how generous I am feeling. I am trying to remind the other people who live with us to remember to do these cleanups too.

The idea behind the cleanup box is that she will have to earn the toys back. For the moment they just go out of rotation until I remember about the box.

Smiles helps me decide which toys should be given away to make room for new ones.

We're worst at organizing the craft stuff, but I'm hoping that her new desk will help with that.

(Edited to finish half thought sentence.)

Edited 2013-09-07 03:33 (UTC)

mostly we argue.

I don't any more, which has led to a fair bit of chaos since the boys are still sharing a small room and neither was willing to take responsibility for cleaning things which weren't theirs. Quinn recently did an amazing job sorting things out, though, so I have hope. And when Morgan moves into his own space I think it'll be much easier for them to stay on top of things.

I consider room maintenance part of being in a household, just like picking up after themselves downstairs, so no special rewards for that. I do occasionally pay for or reward efforts above and beyond the expected, though.

My boy is but three and a half months old. He keeps his room clean or he doesn't get to borrow the car on weekends. We're quite strict about that.

My parents respected my room as my space. It was up to me to clean it or not clean it as I chose, but if I wanted it to get vacuumed when everything else did I needed to get everything off the floor in some manner for that. It worked really, really well. No power struggles of any sort, and I started keeping it tidy in my own way at a very young age, which evolved over time as I got older. (I'm suspect they actually helped me a lot for many years when I was little, but I don't really remember that. I just remember it as my space that *I* got to control, which really mattered to me.)

As an adult looking back on this I note two things:

I strongly prefer a tidy physical space, so suspect I was probably internally motivated to keep it clean just by nature of my temprament. (Then again, it was never, ever, ever a power struggle. If it had been maybe I wouldn't have been so internally motivated to keep everything tidy so young and so consistently throughout my life. Or maybe I would have regardless, at least eventually.)

I was never allowed to bring food or drink in there (or really out of the kitchen until I was older than my oldest kid is now) essentially to circumvent the issue of worrying about anything that might be a sanitation issue.

Now, jumping to parenting, it is clear my older kid *really* wants his room to be tidy. He expresses a lot of frustration when it isn't and is pleased when it is. He is also utterly scattered and easily distracted, needing *a lot* more direction than most kids his age in general. Until he doesn't, and then he is completely focused on a task and *very* distressed if interrupted. (His highly experienced first grade teacher noted that she had never nearly seen such pronounced ADHD in a student, so this is not exactly a surprise.)

Tempramentally, I have been known to say that he is even more like me than me. Control of his own space is seriously important to him. Immensely. (I also strongly believe that once out of early childhood most people need some physical space that is just theirs and that they control. One's own room may not be practical in many families, but even a drawer or a box can be really emotionally important. We have managed his own room for him for now, and have a strategy so we can eventually give each kid their own within our fairly small apartment.)

He doesn't even remotely actually have to ability to clean and tidy on his own yet, even though he is highly motivated. (At school he still needs all sorts of supports to stay focused on work many kids could do independently several years younger than him. This is similar.) He *wants* to clean his room (and the whole house actually) but is still learning what that entails. He will often come up to me and say he wants to clean. Sometimes I work with him, but I also discreetly put things back in the places I know he wants them when he isn't there. That way he isn't so overwhelmed he melts down and can't utilize the skills he has when not overwhelmed.

I am essentially modifying what my mom did so successfully with me for his particular needs and challenges. It isn't always perfect. I struggle a lot with how much I feel I invade his space when he isn't even there, but I also know that I am doing so to set it up so it isn't so overwhelming for him and he *can* work with me (and eventually on his own) to maintain his space the way he wants it. It is a work in progress and I am still figuring it out as I go.

I struggle a lot with how much I feel I invade his space when he isn't even there

This is a good point. Aside from putting away laundry/removing dishes, I don't clean up Smiles room unless she is in there with me.

Other than helping when asked, no. I'm trying to remember how it evolved - probably I used to clean it with him, and then eventually he took over. Changing the bed is still about half me, and we're currently in conflict over whether it's necessary to fold and put away clean clothes.

I don't make a thing out of it, other than honest praise when it looks great or semi-neutral commentary when it doesn't.

I absolutely have stronger things to say about common spaces..

Picking up toys is is merely taking care of oneself, so no rewards/privileges/allowance attached to it. At minimum it's a daily event although if there's a lot of toy clutter, doing an interim clean makes the mandatory evening clean up go faster and more smoothly.

If there's disobedience or unusual power struggle re cleaning up (cough*Critter#2*cough), there may be punishment involved but that's about obedience, not tidying.

At 7 and 5, my Critters still don't really finish tidying. Most stuff is mostly where it belongs but there's always a few toys out, or books next to the shelf instead of on it, or some paper from a project on the floor.

Allowance: we used to say that we did house chores (dishes, laundry, dust busting, etc) because we lived here, and we got allowances because it's nice to have pocket money.

However Critter #1 has almost always made such a fuss about her house chores that we're forced to turn it into allowance-for-house-chorces. Which means we need to decide what level of house chores meet the mandatory minimum. Since Spouse and I have different preferred levels, this may take a couple of weeks.

My mom still tries to make me clean my room more or better (and blames any sickness on my failure to do so) which is approximately as infuriating as one might expect that to be. As I recall, when I was growing up I mostly cleaned it myself, though I'm sure I got help - I definitely didn't vacuum or do that sort of thing.
Related to having control of one's own space - until we moved when I was 15 my family treated my room like the 2nd floor living room, in part because it was the only room upstairs with a phone for a long time. It drove me batty, and my attempts to verbalize the need for privacy were either ineffective because I was so little, or were just ignored. It's impossible to really say how causative these things are, but I think that (coupled with the fact that my older brother stole money and things with monetary value out of my room) is the reason why I'm so vigilant about privacy and not having people touch my stuff now.

Edited 2013-09-07 19:16 (UTC)

We had to do a full pick up every several months or so for vacuuming to happen (either by us or by mom). However on a daily/on going basis, everyone had to have a wide path from their beds to the door and windows so that you could get out fast in an emergency.

We also did our own laundry (including buying our own clothes) from about 6th grade on. We had to feed and clean up after our pets. And everyone had a chore to do. Mom still did the majority of the chores, but this cut down the list a bit & meant that people were a bit more invested in keeping common areas clean. I think our allowance was dependent on doing your chores if I remember correctly?

I had an extremely messy room (clutter, unfolded clothes & dusty - but not dirty dishes/food waste). Now I have assorted stacked clutter in a few areas, but generally get twitchy & cranky the more clutter piles appear and the dirtier the house gets. I work hard to keep things clean once they are clean because I hate cleaning up huge messes. But I do prefer a version of "comfortably lived in" over spotless. (Dirty dishes ok overnight in the sink, but longer than that is not ok.

Clean your room!

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