How I helped Miles clean his room

I made this sign up tonight while helping Miles clean his room. He tends to struggle a lot with keeping it clean, which I have to admit he comes by naturally. My Mom has legendary stories of my messy room when I was a kid. It was so bad that the entire family had a joke that I wasn’t really an only child, that I had a brother named Timmy who was just perpetually lost in my room. Family dinners often included inquiries as to Timmy’s health, and whether anyone had seen him recently.

While it cracks me up to think about it now, I’m really hoping that I don’t go through the same thing my poor Mom did, if only because the mess would effectively be DOUBLED with two kids, including my Miles, who can’t get rid of anything. If I find a gum wrapper he wants to keep it.

“But what are you going to do with it, honey?”

“I don’t know! Just don’t throw it away!”

Tonight is our game night, when a bunch of friends come over and we play board games into the evening (we’re geeky that way), and all of us at home try to pitch in to clean up before friends arrive. I recently cleaned up Miles’s room while he was away at his grandparent’s house (see before and after pics here), and I really want him to be able to keep it up himself.

So I asked him to go clean his room. And then the whining began.

I waffled between just picking everything up for him so I wouldn’t have to deal with his impressive display of melodramatic misery, or letting myself get angry and start doling out consequences for giving me ridiculous responses like, “But I’m TOO TIRED to lift this book up!”

Instead, I talked to him about it. About how part of being a kid was learning to do things for when you became a grown-up, and one of these things was learning how to clean your room. It’s an important skill, I told him, which to his credit he accepted gracefully, instead of pointing out the two piles of laundry in Mommy’s room that begged to be folded. He’s a good kid.

During out talk,it quickly became clear that:

• He didn’t know where to start.
• He didn’t know what to do after he’d done one small thing (like put a single book away).
• He was really afraid I’d leave him to the mess, and that thought seemed to panic him.

So  I made him a list! I got some paper and a big red pen, and I told him we’d make a list to put on his bulletin board, of things he could do in his room that would help him get it clean. I asked him what he thought the first thing should be, and he said, sweet thing, “The first thing should be that I ask for help if I can’t do it.” Which I thought said a lot about his feelings.

I translated this to, “Ask someone in the family for help if I’m feeling overwhelmed.” This brought on a great discussion of what overwhelmed meant, and he seemed really grateful to have a nice big word to stick on his feelings.

Then I put a few more things on the list, tasks like picking up laundry and books and toys, which were easy to do and would make a huge dent in any mess he had going, allowing him to see results. We had to include a line about asking his sister to put her toys away, since they spend a lot of time together and she likes to spread her mess out.

Miles LOVED this activity, it really seemed to help him stay focused, and after I wrote down number 6, he came over to me and said, “That is such a GREAT IDEA! Thanks Mom!”, and threw him arm around me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He was clearly grateful for the help and the direction. And sure enough, about fifteen minutes later he’d cleaned up his room.

It wasn’t spotless, but that’s okay. Who needs spotless when you’re seven years old? As long as you can walk across the floor without breaking a limb, find your shoes, and get to your books, I figure you’re golden.