• Thu, Feb 21 - 11:15 am ET

My 5-Year-Old Will Never Pick Up After Herself, Unless I Stop Doing It

messy bedroomI was a supremely messy child. I shoved crap into the bottom of my closet instead of putting it away. I let broken pencils and old homework assignments pile up in my desk until it had to be dumped on the floor and sorted. Every once in a while, my mom would find an ice cream bowl and a spoon under my bed. Seriously. I was really messy. And my messiness caused more fights between my mother and me than I would care to count.

As I got older, I learned how to clean up after myself. I learned why it was important. But the entire time I lived with my parents, my messy room was my single point of childhood defiance. I just really hated being told what I had to do with all of my stuff. (Yes, I know my parents bought all of that stuff. Whatever. I was a kid.) To this day, I have an odd messy pile of nonsense and sweaters that don’t really need to go in the laundry because I only wore them for a few minutes next to my bed. It’s my little spot of rebellion.

Now, as just another piece of evidence that karma exists, I have my own messy daughter. I have a little girl who has to be ordered, cajoled, and bribed into cleaning up her room. No matter how many labels bins I stuff in her room, she doesn’t ever want to bother putting things away. No matter how much I nag, she shovels things into her closet or scoots them under the bed, just like I used to.

For the first few years of my daughter’s life, I replayed the same routine that my mother and I had. I tried over and over again to my daughter to clean up. I felt personally offended that she didn’t “appreciate” all of her toys, since she didn’t bother to take care of them. I spent hours sitting on the floor with her, trying to help her see why picking up her mess was so important.

And you know what? None of those systems worked. No amount of guilting or demanding or chastising made my daughter more inclined to pick up her toys without a parent demanding it. Just like those arguments never worked for my mother and me.

So I’m decided to change tactics. I’m going to attempt to break the cycle. And I’m going to stop ordering that my daughter clean up her room. It’s time to let messy kids be messy kids, and let them figure out their own ways to deal with it.

Do I want to raise a child who is a slob? Of course not. And will my daughter be allowed to leave a mess in the shared spaces of our house? Not at all. She will continue to do chores and put her dishes in the sink and keep the living room tidy. But really, these things have never been our problem. It’s all about her bedroom, and that’s the place that I’m going to step back from.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000215449796 Kris Washburn

    I’ve actually been taking almost the same idea with my kids. I got tired of the fight. And now my 7 year old leaves his room cleaner than he ever used to, unless his 4 year old sister sneaks in and destroys it. For me, it wasn’t about their true nature, but about how much precious time was being used on the fight, time when we could be building forts, and playing games, and cuddling on the couch. Ok, so the fort was in my room, because I promised we would sleep in it, and I still wanted to sleep in my bed, but hey, putting sheets up, tacked to the ceiling, so that the bed was completely surrounded, it ended up beaing a pretty cool thing.

  • Jessie

    GOOD FOR YOU! I wish my mother had taken this approach, honestly. I swear my entire childhood was an almost endless string of fights about my messy room, my argument generally being that “it’s MY room and MY stuff, and nobody sees it anyway once the door is closed, so why does it matter?”

    I really think this is truly the best way to teach a child about how important having SOME degree of order is, if only so you don’t end up stepping on and breaking a beloved item, or even losing it. I can almost guarantee that the after the first few times she gets upset that she can’t find a certain toy or that something breaks as a result of her carelessness in leaving her things laying around, she’ll shape up pretty quick.

  • http://www.facebook.com/stina.kolling Stina Wargo Kolling

    Make sure to tell us how it works out, ok? I’d love to know if in a few years she did learn how to keep her messy room under control.

    • LindsayCross

      I definitely will let you all know! A year from now, I’ll hopefully be writing something like, “How ignoring my child’s messy room solved all my parenting stress!” :)

  • Messy Mom

    I was an incredibl messy child and my mom stopped caring (except for dishes) when I was about 5…didn’t solve anything and now I’m a messy mom :)

  • chickadee

    I think it’s a great idea. I would make sure that she truly understands the consequences, though, of breaking something expensive that won’t be replaced. That was always what stopped me from going that far when the girls were small.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jessica-Weber/1149485644 Jessica Weber

    I started this a while ago. It seriously hasn’t worked. We have an agreement that she is responsible for her own things and if her things get ruined from neglect they aren’t getting replaced. Her room is nearly empty now because she’s broken dang near everything she owns. On the other hand, her much emptier room is a whole lot easier to keep up, so maybe that was the problem in the first place. We give our kids way too much crap.

    • http://www.facebook.com/paul.white.3532507 Paul White

      What do you mean by “didn’t solve” it. Sounds like it did…

  • CoffeeSnob

    OMG I feel so much better now! When my kids were small I always had them tidy their rooms, but as soon as they hit teen age, the rooms went straight to hell. I do not exaggerate. They are the worst messes ever and I am embarrassed to think they look that way. But whether I beg and cajole or yell and punish, they get slightly better for a minute, then back to hell. I’m wrestling with myself because I have been trying to let myself let go. It isn’t worth the stress! The 18 year-old must do her own laundry and must pick up the common areas, the 16 year-old does some laundry (mainly in summer when there’s no school) and he must pick up the common areas as well. Thank you for your perspective, because it’s a hard issue for me!

  • C.J.

    I can so relate. I told my 7 year old that any clothes that are not put in her hamper will not get washed and if she has to go to school with dirty clothes on it is her problem. She has a hamper in her room and there is one in the bathroom, it shouldn’t be that hard. She also isn’t allowed to have friends over to play if her room is a disaster and if I can’t walk to her bed I am not going to come tuck her in at night. She already knows I won’t replace her things if they get broken because she is being irresponsible. I don’t have to worry about her laptop or her Ipod, Even when her room is messy she keeps the expensive stuff in a safe place. I don’t bug her to clean her room any more, I have left it up to her. Although her room still isn’t as clean as I would like it, it is much better. I also don’t have to go hunting for dirty clothes any more. Good luck, I hope it works out good!

  • Daisy

    I feel the same way. My room is usually a disaster, but it all stays in my room. You will never, ever find one item out of place in the living room, kitchen, or bathroom. Whether I’m living with my family or roommates, I figure as long as I don’t leave messes where other people need to deal with them, it’s none of their business what my own space looks like.

  • K.

    Your child is 5? I think the direction that you’ve chosen is fine, but I’ll be interested to see if it works because most 5-year-olds I know live for the moment and it might be a stretch for them to experience frustration and disappointment and then have the maturity and forethought that their methods must change. Sometimes young children might need a little guidance on HOW to clean up–in a way that makes it less of a chore for them.

    I have a friend who was talking about the same issues, and she was talking about how she read about using an egg-timer for 5-10 minutes which puts the focus on making clean-up a short, temporary chore and takes the pressure off of “all-or-nothing completion.” You can do it on a schedule–like every day or every other day or whatever the child needs. My friend’s brilliant variation on this was to have “clean-up music,” which was a playlist that she and her child put together periodically that was about 5-10 minutes and they’d play upbeat songs while tidying up so it wasn’t all drudgery.

    Also–make sure that your kid’s systems work for how they actually play. For example, you mentioned “labeled” bins, but…do they really have to be labeled? Can’t she just toss stuff willy-nilly into the bins? Do the bins have lids that come completely off, lids that are hinged, or are they open? Does she have to get the bins down from a shelf or out of the closet? All those little things seem trivial, but they do make a difference as to the likelihood the kid will use them (consider what a drag it would be to stop playing, pull a bin out from the closet, realize you’ve gotten the wrong one, drag that one back, find the right one, drag that one out, remove lid, put stuff in, get the lid back on…etc. etc. –kwim?). You want to make the system in such a way that she spends minimal effort maintaining it and doesn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about it–if she has to figure out where the crayon box goes before putting it back ontop of the dresser, then the crayon box needs a different home. And prioritize her stuff–if she only uses fingerpaints once in a blue moon, then those can go away in the closet, whereas the dress-up clothes that come out all the time, might need their own trunk at the foot of her bed.

  • Chariot7

    Actually, this sounds like a really good idea. I like the “no sleepovers unless it’s clean” rule. It’s real incentive but you don’t have to be on her butt about it. No food in the bedrooms is a strict rule at our house but we’ve had problems with ants since we moved in.

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