The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Child

Copyright 2005 Kerry Flinders

I have a reader who asked me a very serious question the

other day. She has a grown daughter who at 24 years old

lives in a messy, disorganized, smelly home. She has 2

young sons who are following in her footsteps. My reader

wanted to know what I thought she could do about getting

through to her daughter about the importance of keeping an

organized home.

She also told me, as an intro to the above question, that

when her daughter was a child and teenager living at home

that my reader would go into her room while her daughter

was at school and she would spend several hours in there

cleaning it all out for her.

Well there’s the problem. One of the best things you can do

for your child is to teach and train them to be organized

and tidy themselves. It is not a basic instinct to clean up

after oneself. It is a learned behavior.

You may think that you’re being mean by making your child

clean up after themselves all the time. Perhaps you

resented your own parents forcing you to clean out your

closet or under your bed when you were perfectly happy with

it the way it was. No matter what the reason is that you

don’t make your child clean up after themselves I’m here to

tell you that it is just a bad idea all the way around.

From the time your child is 2 years old you need to be

making them clean up after themselves. Yes…2 years old. I

used to sit on the floor in my boys messy rooms, or on the

couch in the front room and I would point at just one item

at a time and tell my kids to put it in the toy box, or on

the lower shelf . One at a time each and every little toy

got put away properly…and by my children.

I even did this with my 2 year old niece when she and her

mother came to live with us for 6 months. My sister-in-law

was shocked by the fact I could get her daughter to clean

up after herself so quickly and completely.

As your child grows you need to continue to have them clean

up after themselves. Always. You might feel as if it is so

much easier for everyone involved if you just pick up after

them yourself. But in the long run…is it really what’s best

for your child?

Teach your child that they must not only clean up after

themselves every day but that they can’t get a new project

out to play with until they have put the old project and

the related items or toys belonging to it away properly.

Also, you need to be sure that from about 7 or 8 years old

on, once a month you come into their room with them, sit on

the bed or floor and supervise a good deep down cleaning.

By sitting there and having them clean out every little

corner of their room, including their drawers, closet and

under the bed, you are training them to know HOW to always

do this when needed.

By having them do this once a month you are training them

that this is normal behavior. Sure, when your child first

moves out they may not do this. But after a year or two on

their own, and when their home is dirty, dusty and a wreck,

they know exactly how to tackle each room, systematically,

and are able to clean up and organize in no time.

That’s where my reader went wrong. She never made her

daughter clean up after herself. She never sat there and

supervised her daughter doing a good deep cleaning out of

her room. She just did the work for her. She admitted that

she thought it was pretty self explanatory and that her

daughter was busy enough.

Now she is perplexed as to why her daughter is a slob and

why she is teaching her 2 sons to be slobs too. Probably

because my reader taught her how to be that way by doing

the work for her.

So, please remember that you are doing your child a great

service by teaching and training them how to clean up after

themselves. You are teaching them valuable and necessary

skills to take into adulthood with them. How else will your

child be expected to know how to clean out a room and how

to keep it tidy and organized if you don’t teach them to do

it as a child?

So, what was my advice to my reader? Honestly, I didn’t

have a lot of good advice. In my eyes the damage is done. I

told her I thought the best thing was to take her daughter

out to lunch and tell her she felt she had done her a

disservice by cleaning up after her all the time. I told

her to point out to her daughter how messy her house is and

that she feels like it is her fault. I told her to hand her

a small stack of books on organization and books on quickly

cleaning your home.

Will that work? I don’t know. But I do know that if my

reader had taught and trained her daughter to clean out her

own room after school then this woman would more than

likely be a lot tidier and she would know that she needed

to teach her own boys to be the same.