Pick up Your Room: Make it a Game
I don't want to comment on how to get kids to clean their rooms. However, as a parent and grandparent,…
I remember in college a particular room down the hall from mine. The two girls living there used what I’ll call the Floor Organizational System for everything and I mean for everything, they owned. It was impressive. I often wondered what lurked beneath the jumbled layer of wrinkled clothes that floated like an oil spill on the ocean. I held the opposite, more retentive perspective on organization, preferring a fully visible floor in case of a wasp attack. Then I could drop my organic chemistry book on top of those suckers without getting too close, a strategy that was really effective. Because you don’t suffocate wasps with your pile of sorority tee shirts; you have to smash them. A clean room was a safe room, as far as I was concerned.
Fast forward several decades to the present and the room down the stairs, my tween daughter’s bedroom. One day my daughter decided her closet wasn’t suitable for storing all her stuff and dumped everything onto her bedroom floor. The eruption was incredible; colored pencils cavorted with dirty socks, hair ties adorned Lego creations and Halloween candy wrappers peppered it all. An un-natural disaster.
There is the debate over whether kids should clean their rooms: whether this is a battle to pick with our kids, how private their bedrooms should be, and so on. I realize there are much bigger issues we should focus on as parents but when the state of the bedroom go beyond a little clutter to heaps hiding God-knows-what, I step in. Or rather, because I don’t own steel-toed boots, I avoid stepping in and pull out the “Safety First” talk my kids have heard on loop-mode since they can remember. Because in case of fire, a clear path to an exit is important. Treasures left carelessly on the floor can break when stepped on. Legos scattered on the floor can maim. And speaking of injury, one day I braved my daughter’s messy room and while examining each foothold like the floor harbored land mines, I discovered a small mirror, pulverized into tiny shards. That was it. Her room couldn’t stay in its present condition.
I told her so. But what I couldn’t tell her was clean your room. She wouldn’t know where to start. Her room was well-mixed mayhem and would take hours to return to a relative state of order. Even I, someone who loves a good organizational challenge, wouldn’t want to take on this mess. So I thought: if I had to, how would I do it? One “thing” at a time. But for my daughter, I needed to make the process fun, too. She loves games and puzzles so I made the job of cleaning her room a scavenger hunt. And gave her a reason to do it: once her room was picked up, she could have a friend over. And with floor space, there would be room for sleeping bags for a sleepover.
She was sold. I then gave her daily tasks to help her in her “hunt” for a clean room. Some of those jobs are listed below. Feel free to use these ideas along with some of your own when helping your child find the floor of the bedroom (of course, that’s the final item on the scavenger hunt…):
- Pick up anything that could be used in an art project.
- Pick up all the things bigger than Aspen (our labrador retriever).
- Pick up your summer clothes.
- Pick up your school projects.
- Pick up anything related to Halloween.
Offer to help by providing containers for recycling, trash and donations and bins for storage. I noticed my daughter had a bunch of loose photos and keepsakes from trips and no good way to preserve them. So I bought her a cool, colorful scrapbook to keep her memories in good condition and all in one place.
Wiki How also suggests breaking out the tunes for busting a move while busting the dust. Which was perfect because for Christmas we bought our daughter a little Ihome speaker to use with her Ipod. So she was able to jam to her favorite Lindsey Stirling while tidying up. Wiki also reminds readers to check the out-of-sight-out-of-mind places for clutter: under the bed, closet floor, behind the dresser, etc. It’s amazing what can breed in dark corners.
She got it done, really owning the process. Without my even asking she vacuumed the carpet, too. My daughter’s room looks fantastic.
We’ll see how long it lasts…
I don’t want to comment on how to get kids to clean their rooms. However, as a parent and grandparent, I believe that parents should visit their kids rooms on a random basis. If the parents of the Columbine shooters had been more aware of what was in their children rooms, it might have been prevented. Just as a parent must check phones and computers on a random basis, so should we also see what our kids are up to in their rooms. We have a duty to keep our precious children safe.