AIBU to stop arguing over my hardworking teen's permanently messy room?

[YouBelongWithMe]

Sorry, this is long.

I have three teens. None of them are tidy, really (is this teens?! Is it us?!? Why can I not have at least one tidy one?!?)

We live in a converted bungalow, with a huge master bedroom/en-suite and another small bedroom upstairs, and two further larger bedrooms downstairs.

Teen 1 is 19 and has the other upstairs bedroom. I very rarely see in his room, but I think he's fairly messy. However he does do massive tidy ups (often in the middle of the night) and guts it. It doesn't really affect anyone.

The other two teens are 16 and 14. They are grim. I can't actually go into their rooms without it ENRAGING me.

The youngest can be cajoled into tidying, especially as her allowance hinges on her being compliant and clearing up.

It's the middle child. Through no fault of her own, her room is at the front of the house and so any footfall in the house passes her room. It's a pit. Clothes, make up, books, drinks bottles - you name it, it's on the floor. It's the stuff of nightmares.

She is otherwise excellent. Helpful around the house, takes the dog out, is academic, studies very hard, has a part time job and is just generally very motivated and lovely.

So, would you disrupt all of that to make a point about the room? It will lead to a fall out, strained atmosphere and I'm not even sure it'll end up with a consistently tidy room. But it feels wrong to let her live in what is essentially squalor.

WWYD?

Did you see that the youngest is 14, so not really in the realms of part time work. There’s no reason to think they won’t have the same, good, work ethic.

What we offer is miles less than they can earn in a PT job. The youngest gets £70 a month; the eldest earns ten times that.

Both the older two have tried to find a PT job as soon as they were legally allowed at 16 (Scotland), and balanced it with school work. The youngest can't wait to join the leagues of being employed too!

The older two are great with money - have Monzo pots for different savings goals and are able to budget their money to make it last. My eldest has saved £4k in the last two years, and put it aside for a car.

I don't think we've got every aspect of parenting right (see carpets, haha), but their work ethic and drive to earn their own money has been something we've successfully instilled in them.

Snap. My DCs is a sh*t hole. I don’t go near it, at the end of the day they need to live/sleep in it.

I should add, it’s certainly not the way they’ve been brought up as the rest of my house is immaculate!

I stopped arguing with my dd about her room. She has ASD and keeping organized is a struggle. Unless her room is causing problems, I keep my mouth shut.

why? Because she is working on other life skills that matter more. She learned to drive. She volunteers many hours a week. She takes an absolutely insane course load. She runs an advocacy group.

if her socks are on the floor I don’t really care anymore. If we run low on dishes, she gets ordered to bring them back and load the dishwasher.

everything I have worried about, she has mastered in her own time. She recently dealt with the consequences of the messy room because she lost something for school. I didn’t rescue her and she knew better than to ask for my help. It took most of her weekend to find. She suffered the consequences of her own choices and learned a better lesson than she ever got when I was yelling at her.

I think that by adulthood, you have to have learned to manage your living space to a decent standard. Then when you become an adult, you have to work AND be able to maintain your home. I don't think it's necessary for children to work. The other things like life skills and education are vital to learn in childhood.

Tbh I expect as soon as there is a boy in the scene, this problem will fix itself!

She sounds like a good kid on the whole, so I'd say pick your battles. A bit of nagging/chivvying here and there is reasonable, but I think this is just how a lot of teenagers are with their rooms and it's less important than the kind of person they are in general. IMO anyway, but I've never been someone who puts housework at the centre of everything, life's too short.

I had two very untidy teenagers but they were great kids, polite, hard workers and straight As. I didn't like it but thought there are worse things than being untidy. Perhaps have a quiet word about dirty plates, cups etc being a health hazard and keeping her door shut!

I think the storage idea is a really good one - and if you can, offer time to help her sort and organise. Maybe that's too soft of me, but if she ends up with a nicer room that's a benefit for you as well. Otherwise, what about insisting she opens the windows once a day and keeps the door shut? Keeps the room aired out and saves everyone else looking at it.

It might also be worth talking to her and finding out if she cares. Sometimes it's helpful to be "made" to do things we don't want to do but want to be done! I know I still find it a lot easier to clear a room out if I get a friend to come and help me.

^^ same here! As teenagers mine lived in shockingly grotesque bedroom conditions. I would tackle their rooms every couple of weeks and they would be so grateful. It was like they just couldn't get their heads around it.

They're adults now and I'm stunned by how tidy they are.

Got to agree with that.

I go with leaving messy alone as long as there aren't hygiene issues. I agree that tidying can be overwhelming so better storage is a good idea. For myself I have learnt the hard way that getting the right storage is essential otherwise you'll be even more frustrated that you've spent money and effort and it's still all a mess on the floor. It might be as simple as lots of open baskets she can dump stuff in rather than cupboards. At least it will all be in one place even if it is a jumble and when she needs to do a quick tidy up it can just be scooped up off the floor 🤣

I don't think you 'need' to have a tidy bedroom as an adult if you're the only person using it. Though ideally kitchen and bathrooms need to be clean for hygiene purposes!

I think there is a pint where being untidy becomes being unclean. Things do need a bit of soap and water at some point, regardless of how organised you are.

You what? PT jobs for teens are not only very hard to get these days, but are incredibly valuable for their development and life! What a stupid take.

All my kids bedrooms are their territory and their business. I cant believe the amount of angst on mumsnet about this issue

Sounds like they’re going great tbh and working hard. And not generally lazy.

I’d ask them to have a proper clear up once a month and give them an allowance top up as a motivation. And I’d tidy up the worst of it myself inbetween so it isn’t unmanageable.
I was a messy teen. Honestly between all the school work, crazy hormones, developmental stuff and general life my mind was chaos. I know I didn’t need my mum nagging about a messy bedroom on top of it all.

Nope I leave their rooms to them. If they live in a pigsty that’s on them. As it happens my DD (20) is like your eldest. She’s at uni so makes sure she tidies her room and changes her bed so it’s ready when she next comes home. My DS (22), no longer lives at home but can let his room get dirtier, but keeps the rest of his house tidy, and the kitchen is generally pretty clean. Last couple years he lived at home he had a girlfriend so his room was kept reasonably tidy!

Well my DD is 18 and keeps her room basically tidy she changes her own sheets and stuff and brings washing down but I'm don't think she's ever done a proper deep clean. She's out on Friday and I'm anticipating doing it then !.she will learn DC come to things at different time.

The other DC 13 is brilliant at her room..and regularly does a deep clean

Yeah that's true. I'm not condoning actual filth. But some very organised people at work do have messy homes.

I’m ok with a mess to a degree. Not chaos but normal teen messy. See can you make some steps forward. There is a balance here.

My dd had a terrible untidy bedroom. No food as our dc never took food upstairs. But a mess: books/ clothes/ art stuff/ makeup up etc. But she was a brilliant student and volunteered in lots of situations as well as a very easy dd to get on with : except for the room! She asked me to please cut her some slack about the mess as she was working so hard for exams etc. Now she has her own home and every time l step inside l am amazed at the tidy spaces and how clean and homely it is. Admittedly she married a very organised tidy man but still somewhere along the way she has changed.
I would actually ban food from the room and ignore everything else. And keep the door closed!

I’d say pick your battles. I was an untidy teen. My mum was on at me about it all the time - and it didn’t get any better because I just wasn’t able to manage it on top of everything else. I wasn’t trying to be lazy or disrespectful, it just felt overwhelming, and nobody ever really sat me down and explained where to start and what exactly needed doing.

(I say that, but for all I know my mum may have tried a billion times to sit me down and explain it all - but by then I was so tired of her constantly having a go about what a lazy slattern I was that I’d zone out
and wait for the sermon to be over.)

Happy ending: I am not the tidiest of adults, by any stretch of the imagination - but once I had control over my own space, and some pride in it, and a rudimentary idea of how to organise things and what needs doing to keep a place tidy, I was more or less all right.

Also, it may be a coincidence, but I have also enjoyed more emotional stability as an adult than my peers at school and uni who were hard working, academic high achievers and scrupulously tidy.

I think it bodes well for your general resilience to have at least one thing you’re a bit shit at.

Moderation in all things, and let teens grow into their abilities, I think.

Sprinkle a few grains of black rice under her favourite clothes and wait until she finds it. Then calmly tell her it’s mouse poo.