To parents: do you force your kids to keep their rooms clean?

Do you allow your kids to decide on the cleanliness of their own bedroom? In our household, we have never required our 3 girls to keep their bedrooms cleaned unless they want to (none of them have ever chosen to clean their rooms).

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Comments ( 6 )
  • Ellenna

    Your daughters have NEVER cleaned their rooms? That's not healthy, haven't you heard of dust mites? Yuk, and if they eat food in there and leave scraps around that could easily be attracting rodents and flies. I'm not a clean freak by any means, but to NEVER clean any room is just not healthy.

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    • I didn't say that they have never ever cleaned their rooms--they have--but very rarely. And I would never rewuire them to do so. It has to be their choice completely.

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  • mc_abby

    It teaches them that if they want to keep nice things they have to take care of their stuff. They need that responsibility when they're growing

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  • Beach_Bro

    My older sister and I were required to keep our rooms clean. We had to make our bed every morning before school. Both of us had our list of chores that had to be done. There were no options; we did what was expected.

    I'm older now, and glad that I was taught to pull my weight, and to take responsibility for my own well being. When I was a young single guy, friends would come by to party. They always complimented me on how clean and orderly my place was. I love being self-sufficient!

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  • McBean

    I have heard that girls are really messy unless they have brothers, and that boys are very neat unless they have sisters. I had three boys, and no girls. They were neat.

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  • RoseIsabella

    My parents always constantly harassed me about how messy my room was so I never cleaned it out of spite, and because my mother was constantly snooping through my personal stuff. I actually used to have a clean living space before my mother started snooping. It was a living Hell, and to this day whenever I can't find something I feel for a moment like my mom has confiscated it in the back of my head. I'm 48 years old and my mother is 79 years old. I have had awful trust issues, and more than my share of mommy issues all of my life. I wasn't into drugs, or sex or anything except for new wave music, ballet and my pets when I was a teenager. I was a good kid, who tended to be depressed, anxious and made bad grades in math.

    I honestly applaud you for respecting your daughters' personal space. As a woman who feels that her mother's controlling behavior has wreaked havoc upon her life I think what you're doing is alright as long as they aren't getting into trouble, or doing drugs, or whatever else.

    I do think it would probably help for them to learn to clean their rooms, but I think it should be more of a positive reinforcement thing than anything else. I think it's good to give a young person an incentive to do something like clean his or her room for instance rather than bully them about it like my mother did.

    I did eventually get some lame answer from my mother about her snooping ways a couple of years ago, she said, "you have to watch the quiet ones". Basically my mom made my life Hell as a teenager, and young adult, because I was more quiet, and introverted than my younger sister, and I tended not to confide in her. Here I am today, almost 50, and still fucked up in head, because of that mess.

    Sorry for the crazy rant. I guess I was just sharing my life experience around this stuff. I really do appreciate you asking this question.

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