How To care Kid's Room

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a messiest teen bedroom contest last summer, and the winner was a doozy: It featured a foot-deep layer of laundry that hid, among other items, a can of peanuts, an empty Gatorade bottle, size-11 sneakers, old homework, a deflated SpongeBob SquarePants birthday balloon, several dirty bath towels, a Ouija board, and prom photos.

"If I really wanted to clean it," observed the room's inhabitant, a 17-year-old high school senior, "I could." His mom, who'd twisted her foot just trying to navigate the debris, had given up, for her own safety — and sanity.

Too often, though, a teen or tween's wildly disordered personal space becomes a family flash point. In one informal survey, parents reported that the cause of the biggest battles with their kids wasn't back talk, unsavory friends, or risky behavior, such as drinking. It was messy bedrooms.

"Parents take the disarray personally, and react with anger — even shame and fear," says clinical psychologist Michael Bradley, Ph.D., author of Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind. "But keeping a tidy room just isn't on the adolescent's radar. It's not important to them."

Recent research suggests that this stunning obliviousness to self-made chaos may be rooted in biology. Landmark brain-scan studies from the National Institute of Mental Health reveal that an adolescent's frontal lobe — the region responsible for organizing, planning, paying attention, and stopping and starting activities — is still under construction. So it may not be that kids won't organize the mess; it's that they can't.

At least not by themselves. We talked to three moms who've cracked the clean-your-room code, successfully defusing tensions and getting kids to declutter. Then we asked four experts on teens to explain why these strategies work. Here's what we found.

Combine Cleanup with a Good Story

Jennifer Hilsinger's three oldest children — a 10-year-old son and two daughters, 13 and 14 — tidy up while she reads them a chapter from an exciting book. "We've gone through all of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings books this way," says Hilsinger, 32, of San Marcos, TX. "I started when they were in elementary school, as a way to combine straightening their rooms with their love for story time." If the kids stopped cleaning and just listened, she stopped reading until they got busy again. Now that the children are older (and busy with football, basketball, band, and choir practice), the Hilsingers reserve this beloved family ritual for weekends.

Hilsinger looks forward to teaching the cleanup routine to her 17-month-old daughter someday. "It's made me less stressed, and it's been nice seeing the kids take responsibility for their own things."

Why it works:

"Not only has this mom made a potentially onerous task pleasant, she's also given her kids support by being there," says Anthony Wolf, Ph.D., a Longmeadow, MA, clinical psychologist and author of Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall: A Parent's Guide to the New Teenager. "For many tweens and teens, cleaning up by themselves can be lonely."

Psychologist Laura Padilla Walker, Ph.D., is also enthusiastic. "This approach is collaborative and fun," says Walker, an assistant professor of marriage, family, and human development at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. "The mom avoided turning cleanups into a punishment. She's teaching the children that cleaning doesn't have to be tedious." If being read to doesn't appeal to an older child, a parent could try turning on music the teen likes while they tidy up, Walker suggests.

Make a Place for Each Item

Sandy Connolly of Guilford, CT, decided to cut clutter by finding a place for — or tossing — every item accumulated by her son, 9, and her 5- and 11-year-old daughters. She was inspired by Organizing From the Inside Out, a smart guidebook by Julie Morgenstern. "The kids and I got all their stuff out from every last nook and cranny, put it in a big pile, and sorted absolutely everything into a category," Connolly says. "Some was donated, some was thrown out, and the rest was grouped by category — 'guns and launchers,' for example, or my favorite, 'bugs and pigs' — so we could figure out what size containers we'd need for storage. I found appropriate containers, labeled each one, and put everything away neatly."

Eliminating mess wasn't the only payoff. "I learned things about each child," Connolly says. "I found out just how passionate my older daughter is about purses; there were five or six that she couldn't part with. Thus, the shelf now labeled 'purses.'" The older kids love the transparent labels their mom used to mark each shelf and container. "Maybe naming their things legitimizes their worlds," Connolly muses.

Still, the kids' rooms aren't always neat, she says. "But now I can tell my son to clear off his desk (when it's piled a foot deep in stuff), and he can do it easily and quickly. Before, he'd get so overwhelmed, he couldn't clean up without asking for help."

Why it works:

Creating a place for everything increases the odds that at least some stuff will end up back where it belongs, notes professional organizer Kristin Long of Orlando, FL, whose transformations of teens' rooms have been featured on HGTV. Sometimes she finds that kids' rooms are missing organizational basics: A recent project required getting a wastebasket, a laundry hamper, and a desk for a 13-year-old whose room looked the same as it had when she was 7.

Outdated decor and lack of storage space and functional furniture can zap kids' motivation for taking care of their rooms, Long finds. "When a child approaches her teen years, instead of saying 'Clean your room,' try 'Let's redecorate and reorganize.'"

If your child says yes to R and R, be alert to her reactions, Bradley suggests. "Some kids will love picking out colors and storage boxes," he says, "while others may feel overwhelmed by all the labels and containers and systems."

Still others aren't ready to let go of childhood — and there's no reason parents should force them to. "I've been surprised at how many young teens, especially boys, are hiding their blankies and teddy bears and action figures in their rooms," says Bradley. "Early adolescence is a time of ambivalence. Some kids need the comfort of holding on to childhood."

Tailor the Routine to the Kid

Ardis Meloon, 48, a learning specialist from Orlando, used an insight from her work to melt messy-room tensions with her sons, now 13 and 15. "Every child — every person — learns in a slightly different way," she explains. "I finally realized my sons needed very different instructions and strategies for cleaning up their bedrooms, just as they did for doing their homework."

The lightbulb went on for her when the boys were 10 and 12. "My younger son just needed to be told to clean his room, and he did it — he loves being organized," Meloon says. But just asking — or even insisting — didn't work with her older son. "I realized he needed the job broken up into smaller, doable steps." She began working with him on jobs like sorting through stacks of magazines and choosing the ones he wanted to keep. Later, Meloon asked him to tackle the job himself, setting a timer to help him stay on track.

Meloon also bought organizing systems that fit each son's personality and needs. "My older son is very interested in the business world, so we went to Office Depot together for executive-style desk accessories and a rolling file cabinet." Her younger son got wicker baskets for his toys and see-through containers for stowing the thousands of tiny LEGO pieces that he liked to sort by color. "The rooms still get messy," Meloon says — and sometimes she just lets it happen: "If you can't find your homework and get a zero for the day, it's a powerful life lesson. But in general, the frustration level — theirs and mine — is much, much lower."

Why it works:

"Understanding a child's individual needs is crucial to every aspect of parenting," Bradley says. "Marine Corps–style commands won't work with cleaning up a messy bedroom. I realized that when my own son was young. I was getting very angry about his messy room. Then I watched him reading books in a bookstore one day — he spread 20 volumes on the floor, picking them up and putting them down to read sections. What looked to me like clutter is how he connects with his universe. We declared health and safety rules for his room — no old food under the bed, for example. But the rest was up to him."

Tolerating mess for a while can allow important lessons to happen naturally, he adds. "When your son is desperate because he can't find the ticket to the Flaming Pukes concert, it's a primal moment of truth," Bradley says. "That's when kids start figuring out how to become more orderly, because it finally matters in their world."

The bottom line: Accept imperfection. Notice that two parents interviewed for this story admitted that their kids' rooms are still sometimes disaster zones. "The phrase we teach parents is: 'Your room makes me crazy, and I love you like crazy,'" says Bradley. "Separate the messy bedroom from the heart of the child. It's just not worth going to war over."