Make your bed! Pick up your socks! Clean the closet! These exhortations have been household mantras ever since somebody tidied up the first cave and called it home. Today, researchers say, messy rooms have pulled ahead of curfews, dating and even drug use as hot-button issues. When Charlene Giannetti and Margaret Sagarese conducted a nationwide survey of parents of middle-school students for their book “The Roller-Coaster Years,” 60 percent cited unkempt rooms as the single biggest battlefield in their relationship with their youngsters.
But experts say these bedroom wars may be misplaced parental angst. “I’m not aware of any research to support the idea that you can help teach children responsibility or self-discipline by making them clean their rooms,” says Robert Billingham, professor of human development and family studies at Indiana University. And while sudden changes in the state of a child’s room may reflect an onset of depression or other psychological troubles, Billingham says he’s never heard of any studies showing that children with neat rooms are happier than those with messy ones.
No one’s suggesting that youngsters be allowed to ignore basic health and safety. When kids leave a ham sandwich lying around for five days, it’s probably time to intervene. And no one would argue against keeping an eye out for true danger signs, like drugs or weapons. But parents need to understand what they’re really fighting about when they get upset over that pile of dirty clothes. Carleton Kendrick, a therapist on the Web site familyeducation.com, thinks that what many parents really fear is that their kid’s disordered room is physical evidence of their own inadequate child-rearing abilities. Such battles are often central to family-counseling sessions over which Kendrick presides. “First the mom will say, ‘When I look in your room, Junior, what I see is how lazy you are. You shame the family.’ Then the kid will say, ‘When I look in your room, Ma, what I see is anal retention’.”
As kids reach the teen years, many parents enforce room cleaning out of a sense of powerlessness, says Giannetti. “They may have no control over which friends their child chooses, or whether they take drugs, but getting them to pick up their belongings seems somewhat within the realm of possibility.” But kids tend to think of their rooms as metaphors for their blossoming independence. While they may not be able to govern when Dad hands them the car keys or what time their curfew is, they can–and do–control whether they leave their CDs on the floor.
The friction may also be the result of conflicting styles. Kids vary as much as adults in the emphasis they place on order; all the yelling in the world won’t turn a slob into a neatnik. And what’s messy to one person can be something else to another. Take Bartling’s daughter, Lacey, who views the scene inside her York, Neb., bedroom somewhat differently from her mother. Sure, there are dirty clothes in the closets, and some papers under the bed. But there’s also that collage she made using pictures of her favorite rock bands. And the lanterns she fashioned out of tissue paper. “I think of myself as an artist,” she says. “My whole room is a reflection of my tastes in art and music.”
So what’s the best course of action if your kid’s room is beginning to resemble a 10-foot-by-12-foot petri dish? Generally, loud displays of anger won’t get you very far. One approach is to think like an engineer: break the problem into individual tasks and have your child do them one at a time. That makes the process more manageable. Diplomacy is another tack. For example, if a youngster’s chaotic room is causing him to lose things, Kendrick suggests saying something like: “I noticed you couldn’t find your concert tickets the other day and the guys were outside in the car honking the horn waiting for you. Do you want to brainstorm a few ways to keep this from happening again?” Having fun never hurts either. Kendrick got his kids to tidy up by turning cleanup sessions into basketball games. “They especially liked banking shots off my stomach,” he recalls. Could this be how Michael Jordan got started?
Miller is an editor at Sesame Street Parents magazine.
