10 Tips to Teach Your Teen to Clean Their Room

"Name the most cluttered place in your home." If you ask parents of a teenager this question, they will surely answer - the children's room. And the older the child gets, the more mess there is around them. Why do teenagers love clutter so much and can anything be done about it? We understand the theory and take on board practical life hacks.

How Teenagers and Mess Are Connected

While children are small, their room is usually cleaned by their parents. And they themselves decide where everything will lie (socks here, toys here). But children grow up, things, toys, and then notebooks, books, and gadgets become more, and then comes the moment when, entering a completely cluttered children's room, the parent explodes: "Well, what kind of mess is this again! Is it difficult to clean up? And where is this smell coming from?" Let's press the "stop" button in this place and think about why this is happening at all.

Remember how you taught your children to clean up? And did you teach them at all? Strict orders like "In 5 minutes everything should be shining here" or "If you don't clean up your room, you won't go for a walk" - don't count. Because this has nothing to do with learning.

Unfortunately, it is the learning stage that we most often simply skip, saying one day something like: "You are already big, this is your room, it should be clean here." And then we get angry when this instruction is not followed. Instead of gradually accustoming to the skills of household self-service, parents most often go through anger - and just start shouting or shaming children for the mess. It is also possible to understand parents: the mess in the house is really terribly annoying. But the teenager here does not quite understand what exactly they want from them.

If you told a teenager that their room is now their responsibility, then be prepared for the fact that in response to your request to clean up the table, they will say that this is their table and it will look the way they like and how it is convenient for them. And it is convenient for them that some scraps, candy wrappers and apple cores lie there in an artistic mess. First, we say that the teenager themselves must be responsible for their room, and then we demand that they act according to our rules. A dissonance arises: the person seems to have been given responsibility and authority, but they were given somehow not for real. As a result, the child simply ignores all these complex conditions (there is no logic in them anyway), the parents get angry, and the mess only grows.

Can anything at least be done with all this? Probably yes, but, firstly, you need to act gradually (and preferably without nerves), and secondly, your words alone will definitely not be enough here - you will have to get involved in the process.

1. We Start Gradually

Do not throw away the apple core for them, but ask them to take it to the trash can. Do not clean the backpack from banana peels that have begun to live their own lives, but remind them to check if the child has taken everything out of the backpack and thrown out the trash. Day after day, calmly and patiently emphasize what exactly needs to be done. And do not break down if something goes wrong. A new habit is formed in 21 days, remember? When it comes to a teenager, this period is a minimum, during which it is generally not worth making any conclusions and sudden movements.

2. We Agree on the Rules

Yes, the teenager's room is, of course, their territory. However, they still live in an apartment where there are other residents besides them, and the smells from dirty clothes and dishes spread everywhere, and dust also has the property of penetrating beyond the room. Therefore, there is a minimum of cleanliness that should be observed.

Clearly indicate what is included in this minimum in your understanding, and gently remind the teenager of the need for appropriate actions to fulfill it. Discuss that in case of non-compliance with the terms of the agreement, you have the right to enter the room and clean it yourself. Most teenagers are unlikely to like the idea that their parents will rummage through things on their table.

3. We Share Responsibilities

Do not load the teenager with everything at once. The pool of household duties should be increased gradually. Agree on who is responsible for what at the initial stage. For example, they make the bed and tidy up the table and in their personal belongings, and mom helps with the organization of things in the closet and wet cleaning.

4. We Build an Algorithm

Together with the teenager, make a detailed instruction of what needs to be done in the room to maintain cleanliness. And how often it should be done.

• Make the bed.
• Collect things from the floor and take them to the laundry basket.
• Take dirty dishes to the kitchen.
• Wipe dust from open surfaces.
• Maintain order at the workplace.
• Vacuum the floor.
• Do wet cleaning.
• Water the flowers.

Hang this list on the door or above the workplace. Remember that some things are not so obvious to a teenager. If earlier they did not take up cleaning seriously, they may simply not know how often you need to change bed linen and why you need to ventilate the room at all.

5. We Re-invent Storage Systems

The parent's phrase "Put your clothes in the closet" can be understood by a teenager literally: they will simply push the things scattered around the room into the wardrobe and will be quite satisfied with the result. However, this "order" will last approximately until the first change of clothes. What to do? Help your child organize a smart space. You can, for example, buy a separate laundry basket and put it in the children's room - let dirty socks and T-shirts, which are usually scattered around the room, now live there and once a week they are transferred to the washing machine in bulk. It would not be superfluous to check how the wardrobes are organized in the children's room - perhaps it is worth adding hangers for T-shirts so that they do not lie in piles on the shelves. You should also think about how best to organize the storage of underwear - those small baskets or boxes that can be freed from old toys or other, less used things will do.

6. We Implement Morning, Day or Evening Rituals

For younger teenagers, routine and discipline are very important. This makes their world safer. And just as for young children, bedtime rituals were built with a bath and reading a book, so with a teenager, cleaning things can be included in the evening rituals. And on days when there are fewer lessons, the child can switch and clean up after school.

7. We Accept More Guests (Yes!)

You have probably noticed that before the arrival of friends, the teenager's room magically becomes perfectly clean. Therefore, try to invite friends to your place more often. The more often they visit after school, the cleaner it will be in the room. Gradually, this will become a habit, and order will be maintained on a regular basis.

8. We Respect the Rights and Freedoms of the Child

Children and teenagers always strive to arrange their personal space. Remember, even in childhood, when they made playhouses, they had perfect order there and all the things lay or stood in the places allotted for them. All because children felt like full-fledged owners in these places: you are unlikely to have seriously tried to interfere and insist that toys should sleep like this, and doll dishes should stand exactly here, right? What does all this mean? And the fact that it is important to give the child a feeling that the room really belongs to them.

The ideal option would be to offer the teenager to re-arrange the space themselves to suit their needs: depending on your capabilities, they can repaint the walls, choose new textiles, stick posters on the wallpaper that they like, or even paint the walls with graffiti (we will try to refrain from criticism) and so on. So the child will feel: the place where they live is not just a room in the parents' apartment, but their personal "house", equipped according to their personal rules.

9. General Cleaning - Also Together

General cleaning in the apartment is mandatory, and the teenager knows about it for sure. When the time comes to do the next cleaning, offer the teenager to do it in their room together. According to all the rules, including the need to move the bed and rake out all the candy wrappers, cores and dirty things from under it. And with further floor washing. Having taken an active part in such actions several times, the teenager will be motivated to reduce the degree of cluttering of the space, because now they will have to clean up on their own.

10. Forgive and Endure

One of the tasks of puberty is to defend their right to be an independent, independent person. Hence the бунт and resistance. And the mess is born also from a feeling of contradiction and resistance to the orders in force in the family. This is what in neurophysiology is called the "freedom program."

If for mom cleanliness and order are of particular value, then it is most convenient for a teenager to express resistance precisely in this: to scatter things, candy wrappers, drag an endless number of cups into the room ...