I need your advice/opinions/experiences re: teenagers and their bedrooms...

[Idobelieveinfairies]

..and i am sure it's been done a zillion times before, so apologies..

How many teenage mums and dads can actually turn a blind eye at the state of a teenagers very yucky bedroom?

DO you accept it as normal teenage behaviour?
Given up totally?
Having long on-going never winning battles with them?

I am at my wits end and feel like crying this morning.

She is 15, doing really well at school, has a saturday job and has the occasional hockey, netball match after school....but does have more than enough time to keep her room tidy.

All i ask is that she opens her window in the morning, picks up her dirty washing and puts it in the wash basket, put away her hair-dryer, make-up..basically everything off the floor and then puts away clean washing that i leave on her bed.

I will make her bed, dust, and hoover-if i can ever get through the mess that is.

She currently has 2 carrier bags of rubbish hanging on the back of her door....how can she sleep in her room with the rubbish hanging a metre away from her head!?!?!?!? [blurgh]

She desperatley wamts new bedroom furniture but there is no way i am buying her anything until she can prove she can lok after her room. Thats not too harsh is it?

Her brothers are tidier than her and when they have been a bit on the lazy side they will give their room a proper good clean with only me having to ask them once. With her it is arguement after arguement...she dosen't see the point of tidying as it will only get messy again.

It is annoying me that she was sat on her behind in the lounge all yesterday evening knowing that her bedroom needing doing.

Am i being too anal?...lol

Whats growing in your teenagers bedroom at the moment??lol

And definitely no new stuff for the room. We are having the same arguments negotiations about new furniture & carpet. You can hardly see the carpet so no point. dd says she would look after nice stuff

say as long as she keeps her room tidy for a month you wil buy her new bedroom furniture...

Total pigsty.

I just shut the door and try to ignore it. Occasionally venture in to rant, but it is his tip, let him live in it.

I rally my DSSs into sorting their stuff - particularly clothes - twice a year by bribery - they only get new clothes if they accept to try on all their existing clothes for DP and me and we decide together what fits and what needs to be recycled, and then we have a discussion about what we are prepared to buy them. This deals with a huge amount of mess as it gets rid of loads of clothes.

I also go into their room and chuck out all the rubbish lying around every week. They know that if they leave rubbish around, it will disappear.

Overall we strive for www.consensual-living.com/consensual living rather than confronting or compromising. We didn't always live like this, but life is so much happier and more peaceful now.
There are several people living in this house (and as we home educate we spend a lot of time here together) What one person does impacts on others and we try and find a way through that everyone can live with reasonably happily.

I don't nag and don't moan about the state of their bedrooms.
Their rooms -their responsibility.
Shut the door don't look.
We knock before we enter their rooms as they do on ours.
Only washing that gets into the basket downstairs gets washed.
To be fair though they do often do their own washing now too.
Clean clothes get taken back upstairs and placed on the chair/bed/ any clearish space I can find.

I do ask the to go up and bring down crockery/cutlery. Otherwise dh will go up and get it-because it is needed by others.

dd1 was very messy. But as I said her room, her responsibility. She lived the way she wanted to and tidied up ever so often-although not as often as I liked. But she doesn't tell me what to do with my room and I didn't tell her what to do with hers.
Keeping the door meant it didn't impose on others.
She lives in a flat now, shared with others and keeps that clean and tidy I believe from what I am told.

When dd1 left home, dd2 15, quickly moved into her old and bigger room.
She had a set budget to decorate the room. She found a nice roll of wallpaper in the bargain bin for £1, therefore giving her a little more to spend on nicer paint for the woodwork and radiator. She had a little left over for a rug purchased on ebay.
She needed a little help with wallpapering the wall around the window but the rest of the decorating she did herself. I have been very pleasantly surprised at how much cleaner she now keeps the room. It isn't always tidy but it is clean and she does have a blitz every few days.
Doing all the decorating herself has made her proud of the room and want to keep it clean she says.

Ds (now 21) has a bedroom that still gets VERY untidy and rather mucky. T'was ever so- until he started to have girlfriends round. Suddenly when the guitars come out and the vacuum cleaner goes in, I know for certain there is a girl on her way round!

in my house, pocket money is dependent on beds being made, laundry put away and rooms kept reasonably tidy. Works a treat for the youngest but less so for my almost teen. I've given up stressing and have adopted the 'out of sight out of mind' approach.

leave it
my dd's room is diabolical most of the time
she does tidy and clean when she has a friend to sleepover.

It's hard to turn a blind eye but it does get easier.

Shut the door and walk away.
I don't do anything in there.

didn't realise this is an old thread and I've already posted sorry

Well thanks to you all for making me realise that my 2 teenage children are normal & that I should not waste any more time aksing/pleading/bribing them to at least tidy their bedrooms. I now feel like I've had permission to ignore it.

Leave her to it. At 15 she should be making her bed and hoovering her room herself. My Dc's have been in charge of their own rooms since they were about 14. My youngest is 17 and I do remind her to tidy her room and occasionly ask if she wants help organising it ( she is dyspraic so has trouble with organisation). But that is as far as it goes. I don't go in to make the bed or hoover.

TBH I just let DSD (16) get on with it. She's old enough to be responsible for her own room. She had a sort out the other day and brought 6 bin nags of rubbish down. We moved house 8 months ago and when we moved in we bought laminate flooring or carpet for all the rooms. She wanted laminate for hers. So DH laid the laminate downstairs and carpet in our room and in the dds room. He refused to do DSD's room until she sorted it out. Well he's still waiting. Even though she had a clear out the other day her room is still full of crap. So the laminate has been sat on the landing still in packs for the past 8 months until she decides to get too it. God knows when than will be.

DD1 almost 13 is such a messy madam. She doesn't let anyone in her room but i pop in when she is at school armed with gas masks, rubber gloves and industrial bleach

Apparently i was like that at her age, didn't know what colour my carpet was for several years, and i still am. Life is too short for show home living.

I do insist on dirty washing being put out and rubbish and pots brought out. DH bribes her to keep on top of it but if he didn't you wouldn't be able to get in the door.

my teenagers are much tidier than me

don't generally clean their bedrooms. If they want to live in a mess it's their choice. I do try to see they have enough storage space so might think new furniture was needed. We also have sessions before Christmas and sometimes at other times when they are required to look at whether they still need all their clutter.

Washing has to be in the basket but I will send them to collect school uniform if that is missing.

I do iron their clothes but am wondering if I should insist they do that themselves.

I hoover DD (14) bedroom floor once a week having dumped the contents of the floor on her bed. I then shut the door on it until the following week UNLESS I can smell her room through the shut door when I'm downstairs (not joking)then I will nag scream ask her politly to clean it, change her bed and open her windows. The only reason that I hoover in there is so that I can find her school letters which she forgerts to give me.

Well my 16 yo daughter is messy and it drives me bananas.
She is studying hard for exams but we have a very tight scedule and rules are to be obeyed im afraid. I go into her room about 6 nights a week and spend 5 minutes picking up things that arent were they should be-i dont mean make up in make up drawer and hair dryer in hair dryer drawer-
im talking stuffed used sanitary towels behind the radiator,mouldy food in school bag,dirty pants under bed,food stuffed anywhere, bags of rubbish hanging on door that positively smell, snotty tissues ect. I pick the whole lot up with dirty clothes ect and pile on rug in middle of floor. She has NO respect for her clothes or her things. Ive been thr the if its not in the wash bin it wont get washed stage, and she quite happily walks out in dirty crumpled clothes.
I insist on a clean room and am, entirely comfortable with going ape when i find used sanitary towels ect regularly -she does have a bin ect .Phew feel better now.
Wish i didn`t have to go in her room but i cant cope with the smell and filth if i dont, and her sister who is like me gets very upset as they have to share.

My stepkids rooms aren't that bad.

But mostly because they hardly let me in there so they have to clean it up themselves. lol

I pick up laundry and some clothes, vacuum and such but the rest they do themselves.

If they don't then they just live in filth which isn't great for them.

DD tidies her bedroom every night. It's part of her after school routine. Homework, dishwasher and bedroom. It takes her 10 mins because she does it every day.

I do not wash clothes unless they are in the washing basket. If she wants something and it's not clean - tough or wash it yourself.

The first time i asked my dd to hoover, i happened to walk past the living room and saw what she was doing..... She was just lifting the hoover head (cylinder hoover) and picking it up and putting it down on the odd bit of fluff or small piece of dirt she saw on the floor. She didn't push it round the whole room just banged it down when she saw something to hoover!!!!!! When i tried to explain how to use it (god knows she should have known as i am addicted to hoovering!) she looked at me as if i were a clean freak!!!

santababi-do you have my daughter living in your house? mine's(nearly 14) excatly the same and beginning to lose my patience.She's almost at kleptomaniac/tramp status.

The sanitary towels are a mind boggler for me too.

Same problem here. Used to get suicidal about the untidyness. Now it's beyond belief. Sanitary towels everywhere, despite being provided with bags and bin. Mouldy food, knickers I have to throw away. The stench is unbearable. Trouble is I'm a tidy fanatic and I find it totally unacceptable. I dread to think what happens when she sleeps over at her friends or her dads. She went away for 2 weeks at christmas with her dad and stayed with extended family. Had her monthly too so was worried about situation. No worries, opened her case and she had brought all her dirty towels home with her. I iron all her clothes only for her to have a shower, drop wet towel on floor on top of clothes and then wear wet, screwed up clothes to school.

My sons, 14 and 17 have to keep their rooms clean and tidy as part of the deal to get their pocket money. They both do all own washing and change beds. I cast an eye over how the rooms are from time to time and rmins them to get on with it if they are slacking. Seems to work well. I really have not got time to clean and wash for teenagers, but do iron shirts and other things that really need it. We have been doing things this way from age 13 - they seem to be pleased to be "grown up" and responsible then and only veer off track later on

Dd1 is only 11 but we have been having the problem of messy bedroom for ages now.

The only thing that makes her tidy it is if I remove the fuse from the plug to her tv.

Trouble is, as soon as the room is tidy and she gets the fuse back then we get back to bombsite within hours.

I once cleared the whole thing out for her, gave it a real deep clean and then went in every day to just give it a quick sweep in the hope that this would help her see that it is nicer when it is tidy. I missed 1 day of doing that and it was back to bombiste again and I gave up.