Joanna Fortune: How can I make my messy teen clean their bedroom?
The last time I cleaned my teenage son's bedroom, he got angry, saying it was his space and I should leave it alone.
The situation you describe is typical of teenagers. They can be very clear about their desire and right to privacy and boundaries but not so strong on the correlating responsibility of those rights.
As a teenager, it is often easier to see and point out what your parents are getting wrong than to reflect on your role in the situation and consider your responsibility. Again, this incongruence is typical and expected during adolescent development.
As for your question about managing your son's refusal to take care of his bedroom and save peace, I can offer you a couple of suggestions. He is growing up, and the days of singing the 'tidy-up' song together are long gone, but there are lessons to be learned from the song as it encourages young children to work with us to tidy up. In the same way, you can encourage him to work collaboratively with you on this.
You can agree not to enter his room while he is not there (outside of genuine exceptional circumstances), but he must agree to work with you. Tell him that you believe he can maintain a clean bedroom and want to support him, so you will give him a list of daily and weekly tasks that you can check in with him on.
The daily tasks should be small things such as:
- He will bring laundry out of his room daily
- He will bring any food items/dishes and cups out of his room daily
- He will make his bed
So long as you see laundry and dishes coming downstairs, you will trust that he also made his bed. However, if you do not see any laundry or dishes, you have the right to go into his room and gather those things up.
- He will strip his bed and bring the bed linen downstairs, and you will leave fresh linen at his door for him to make up his bed weekly.
- He will hoover his bedroom once a week (help make this more fun by encouraging him to play his music while doing this. Set a timer to see how quickly he can get it done)
- He agrees that you can come into his room with him once a week to have a quick look that all is good
You could put some incentives in place — for example, if he does this for a month, he earns a privilege he has been seeking. However, teenagers must learn to take responsibility and care for themselves, and their space is essential. Everything in life doesn’t come with rewards, so I will leave this one up to you to decide, as you know what works best for him.
When maintaining his space, manage your expectations and standards and adopt a 'good enough is good enough' mindset. Clean enough is clean enough.
This approach will show that you hear him and respect his privacy and boundaries while also being clear that he has a responsibility and that if he wants his privacy, he has to work collaboratively with you.
Deal with this situation with a playful state of mind, keep your tone light and positive and find ways to 'make it fun to get it done'.
- If you have a question for child psychotherapist Dr Joanna Fortune, please send it to parenting@examiner.ie
