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How to Teach a Teenager to Keep a Bedroom Clean

© Linda McDonald - 1st Place Tech Writing Humor Contest 2000

I vowed I’d never sound like my mother. But nobody told me that your kids compel you to do exactly that. It’s a genetic code programmed into them. It becomes effective the minute they turn 13 and shuts off on their 20th birthday. I’m the mother of a teenager – age 17. Before I knew it I sounded like Mom more often than I cared to admit.

“I don’t care what everyone else is doing, you’re not doing it!” “Because I said so.” And the ever-popular, “Look at your room! It’s a disaster! I want this cleaned up before you go anywhere!”

Depending on where the “anywhere” is, sometimes the room gets cleaned in record time. Depending on when the “anywhere” is to take place, the entire mess might well be stuffed under her bed or in her closet – if I choose to look there.

It is relative, this cleanliness thing, even among adults. My husband thinks that I’m cleaning an already-clean house when I think it’s a pigsty. There are many teenagers who have rooms that should be declared “hazardous to your health.” My daughter’s room has never reached that level of disaster. Possibly only because I rant and rave long before the carpet is entirely covered with clothes, books, dirty dishes and trash.

That is not to say that the carpet isn’t littered with those items. For the past week, I have stepped around empty K-Mart bags, candy bar wrappers, piles of dirty clothes and piles of (allegedly) clean clothes, money and numerous items that are probably becoming fossilized. Most of the time, I don’t go into her room. As long as I don’t have to meet the problem head on, I can ignore it. If an odor wafts from her room, I just close the door…and cleaning 101 begins.

“Sarah!” I holler, “Do you know what a mess your room is? What kind of garbage do you have in there – the whole house is starting to stink! I want you to get to work right now and I don’t care if it takes you all day long. You get that room cleaned up!”

From her supine position on the couch in front of the T.V. she rolls her eyes at me. “Mom, I will later.”

That has been her answer for weeks now, and the compost pile on the floor in her room is evidence enough that later has come!

I decide to try another approach. Bribery. Every parenting book, for any age child, strongly advises against bribery. Those authors surely never had children of their own! I got along for several years as a parent without bribery. Once that genetically coded program kicked in, bribery became as essential as e-mail.