I am not a neatnik. I am neither Spartan nor obsessive about cleaning; I am not hugely organized and my feng is more shooey than shui. Cleaning takes precious time away from writing, so I do a minimum, hubby does a little more than a minimum, and we rush around like lunatics with a vacuum cleaner whenever somebody is supposed to come over.
However, I am finding that #1 (age 6) is such a clutterbug that sometimes it makes me want to cry. She saves everything from broken McDonald's toys to pieces of ripped up paper or shreds of dead leaves. Nothing is garbage unless I tell her it has to be. Messes follow in her wake like dirt follows PigPen from the Charlie Brown comics. I keep the door to her room closed so I don't have to see it, though the mess sometimes creeps into the rest of the house like a kudzu of crap. We often "misplace" things in there like socks, ballet shoes, money, dishes, school books, more socks, the remote control, my laptop mouse, photo albums, and so on.
So, people with kids, what can you expect from a 6 yr old re: cleaning her room and keeping it at least kinda sorta picked up so it's not unusually dangerous, with broken pieces all over the floor that will cut you and make you trip into the dresser, requiring stitches in your head? (This actually happened to her.)
When we ask her to pick up, which we do every couple days, she picks up half of what she's gotten out and her room usually looks like a hazardous waste dump, Barbie style. Sometimes it's such a huge chore that we just ask her to "clear a path" to her bed so when she gets up for her midnight potty run, she doesn't get hurt.
We have what I feel is a great system for organization so simple even my husband understands it: toys of certain types go in a series of tubs, and she's only supposed to have one type of toy out at a time for easier cleaning -- because she can toss everything into the appropriate tub when she's done. Legos go in the legos tub. Barbies go in the Barbie tub (and suitcase). Dinosaurs go in the dinosaur tub. The items for each tub are easy to sort. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if you put everything roughly where it goes, there is even extra space in her room. *Gasp!*
I don't feel I should venture into her room on a weekly basis for a thorough cleaning, but man, the rubbish really gets to me. And when I do a thorough cleaning, like today (hence the rant), it takes hours and hours.
Thoughts?
JW
6 comments:
I've been telling my kids the same thing for a few years now: either you clean it to the point where Mom is basically happy or Mom cleans it, and believe me, you won't be happy. Granted, I rarely get them to make it as "Mom clean" as I'd like, but it's usually close enough.
You've got a good system there with the bins, but I don't think you can expect a 6 year old to be on top of it all the time.
What gets me is when my kids ask where something of theirs is. I ask if they took it out of their rooms and when they reply no I give them Mom's arched eyebrow of "If your room was clean and you put stuff away, you wouldn't have this problem, would you?" It doesn't always get the room cleaned up, but I do get a certain satisfaction from it when they give me their knowing sighs.
Good luck!
A kudzu of crap??! LOL!!
I don't have kids, so take any kid-related advice from moi with a truckload of salt, but...
My mother may be even more left-brained than I am, and she had a pretty decent system to keep the house from turning into a huge mass of Barbies, books, musical instruments, and school paperwork. She was in grad school and also worked as a teacher, so in our house, "school paperwork" took on epic proportions.
Her system boiled to one word: bribery. If we wanted to play Barbies, we had to clean up our play area so we could feel good about playing in a nice, clean room. If we wanted a nicer allowance, we would sign up for age-appropriate cleaning tasks. Mom is infamous for her "lists," and I seem to have inherited the same thing.
It sounds like you're already doing the right thing with getting your daughter to at least put her toys away and to keep a path cleared so she can get to her bed. Has she ever said why she hangs on to things that should be thrown away?
We had the same problem, more with Number Two than Number One, though to a certain extent with both. The problem didn't get "solved" until the kids switched bedrooms and we cleaned EVERYTHING out of both rooms. Since then, they've been able to keep things much more manageable, though both throw up all their stuff on a daily basis and usually have to spend one weekend day every week or two cleaning up.
I think Number Two was just 7 years old when we did the Great Room Exchange, so you might have some light at the end of the tunnel as far as the desire to keep crap that should be thrown away.
Money works on my kids. The girls are six, and while we do have to stand over them and tell them "Now pick up the Barbies. Now the stuffed animals, now the books," they generally do it with a minimum of whining with the promise of getting their allowance.
So, perhaps money would make your little darling be a little more motivated.
Oooh, money is a good idea. I've already got her obsessing over her college fund *heh heh heh*
JW
One of my kids is extremely motivated by money. Also, when the toys left out disappear, they usually start to clean up. At least for a couple of days. :)
Good luck!
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