Bedroom Experiment

Warning: This post might lower your opinion of us as parents - read with caution.

Some families have very clean houses, and seem to effortlessly maintain said cleanliness - this is not our house. As parents Shannon and I sometimes feel like all we do is ask our kids to clean up their stuff, especially in their bedroom. From our perspective we viewed these requests as teaching opportunities and expect our kids to responded dutifully; our kids however feel that we are actually implementing an ancient form a torture and resist with all their will power. This usually leads to tension, escalating voices, and finally tears (note: the desired outcome, "a clean room", is not always achieved).

A couple of weeks ago I had a proverbial "light-bulb" moment: "maybe our kids don't need us to tell them to clean their room so much, maybe if we gave them a little more freedom they would make the choice themselves, and keep their room at least at an acceptable level of clean". The possibilities seemed endless, I could already see a home where parent and child interact as equals treating each other with respect and understanding, yelling would be a thing of the past, peace and harmony would abound, cats and dogs would play together, and conversation would often spontaneous erupt into song (actually spontaneous singing does occurs almost daily in our home). All this could be ours if only we as parents could relinquish our need to control and dictate our kids' lives - it was so simple.

I decided to set up an experiment, and Shannon was willing to participate. We agreed that for the next week we would not say anything to the kids about cleaning their room. This included not asking them to: put dirty clothes in the laundry room, make their beds, or remove the piles of hoarded toys that always seem to accumulate on their beds. We also would not do anything ourselves to mess up the room (e.g., throwing toys in their room that were left out in the family room).

To start the experiment I spent the afternoon with the kids cleaning up the room really well, which included: organizing books, pulling stuff out from under the beds, removing the drawers and getting the clothes that had fallen behind out, etc. And then we stepped back and waited for the magic to begin.

To document the progress of the experiment we took pictures each day.

 Day 0

 Day 1

Unfortunate they decided to get the doll house out on the first day

This was a hard day for us as parents, we had put a lot of effort in to getting the room really clean, it would have only take a few words and maybe 10 minutes to get the room cleaned up - but we resisted.

Day 2

Entropy begins to take over

Day 3

Day 4

Notice the blue bag in the left center of the room, Myra took the initiative to clean up the clothes, and began filling the bag - but she got distracted and abandoned the effort.

 Day 5

The doll house now serves as a bridge to help bypass some of the mess

 Day 6

 Day 7

Day 8

Our feelings after the first weeks was that things were not going in the right direction. On day 8, still not admitting to our experiment (nor did the kids seem to notice that we had not asked them to clean up, but they did ask why I was always taking pictures of their room), we instituted a program to reward them for doing certain acts around the house, many of which focused on their room. As a result a modest effort was made to clean up some of the mess.

Day 9

So much for cleaning

Day 12  

Last day

We did not quite make it to two weeks, the room got so bad that we had to terminate the experiment due to safety concerns. There were several times during the experiment that the kids hurt their feet by stepping on toys, however this did not motivate them to clean up the mess, I think more it just encouraged them to avoid going in their room.

Based on the results of this experiment we have to reject our hypothesis. Our conclusion is that kids, at least our kids, are not capable of managing their own living space in, what we consider, a reasonable manner without parental guidance.

On the last day I put together a slideshow of the pictures from each day of the experiment. We told them what we had done and then flipped through the pictures together. The kids were pretty shocked to see how bad the room had gotten in such a short time, when we got to the last picture (which represented the current state of the room) we sat and talked a while about their impressions and how they felt about their room. They were extremely uncomfortable with the messy picture and did not want to look at it, even asking to go back to the picture of the clean room.

Unfortunately the peace and harmony that I had hoped for did not materialize (as parents, once we got past our inclination to nag them to clean their room it was kind of nice not having to worry about it, but alas it was not meant to be). We are now back to where we stared, a nightly volley of "clean your room up" and "awwwhh, do we have to" or "mmmggg" (that is suppose to sound like a very annoyed guttural grunt that Lexi has perfected which is accompanied by a foot stomp).  But at least now we know that our parental efforts are needed, and our kids can't argue that they don't want a clean room.