Teens’ Messy Bedrooms - to clean or not to clean?

Messy is a word we use to explain a conflict with an expectation we had. Eliminate the expectation, and you eliminate the messy.  

Steve Maraboli

Is there any teenager in this world that keeps a neat, orderly and tidy room without being nagged, commanded, bribed or threatened to do so? We manage well enough to get our children to keep their rooms clean when they are little but the moment they reach their teenage years, it seems like all sense leave their heads because their rooms look like disaster zones. What is it with them? What is so darn hard about keeping their rooms in order?

How can they possibly live in a room which has an unmade bed, clothes strewn everywhere, opened drawers dangling dangerously, closet doors flung ajar, dirty clothes in growing piles, clean laundry still in the baskets waiting to be put away, books and stationery scattered everywhere, discarded drinking glasses and empty plates taking pride of place within the  four walls which looks like the aftermath of a hurricane? 

I grew up in an age and culture where it was drummed into us that cleanliness was next to godliness. As children we didn’t have the luxury of having our own bedrooms but even though our tiny space was shared with siblings, it was clutter-free, clean and ever so tidy. Today, our privileged teenagers boast their own spacious bedrooms, have their choice of designer decor, generous cupboard space and study area but their rooms are akin to dumps. 

“Clean up your room this instant!”

“It’s my room! Don’t tell me what to do!”

“It’s my house and you will do as you are told!”

“It’s my room and I should be able to live in it the way I want!”

“Wrong! We are paying the mortgage so you will bloody well clean up your room!”

And so the battle lines are drawn that can go on for years and years from adolescence into adulthood. Who is right and who is wrong here?  How can this problem be resolved? 

If you have a kid with a messy room, you have one of two options: you could train them to be orderly or you could change your own expectation or fixation with orderliness. From my own experience, I will tell you beforehand that the first option will just bring you frustration and tears and I wish you luck if you choose to go that road. However, if you change your obsession with order, then you may achieve some success. I speak from personal experience. 

As a parents we need to put things in perspective: while order, structure and cleanliness are high on our list of priorities, it may not have the same importance according to our teenage children’s needs. To them, privacy, autonomy and independence are issues that are higher up in the rungs of the ladder of life. Also, who said that order is good and chaos bad? Just because we were brought up to believe that everything that is neat and tidy is morally good and everything that is chaotic and messy is a sign of bad character, it doesn’t mean that we need to perpetuate the same flawed reasoning generation after generation. 

Some of our most eminent creatives have had the messiest desks like Steve Jobs who favoured clean, sleek lines in design, Mark Zuckerberg whose cluttered desk belied his billionaire status and JK Rowlings who was more interested in creatively churning out the Harry Potter series. Was it not the greatest genius, Albert Einstein, who famously remarked when his attention was drawn to his messy work desk: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”. There is growing evidence to suggest that creativity and clutter go hand-in-hand. 

I am a very orderly person by nature. Maybe, I am underplaying this irritating personality trait of mine because I am the kind of person that cannot sit at ease if the home I am visiting does not have their picture frames aligned in linial precision or the rug is a few degrees askew. I fight agonisingly with the temptation to jump up and put it right. You get the picture? I am a very visual person and therefore as a parent I expected my kids’ to display the same degree of order. 

My daughter is every mother’s dream: she’s articulate, she’s healthy, she’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, she’s creative, she’s honest, she’s empathetic, she’s god-fearing, she is everything you would wish your daughter to be if you could order a list of personality traits. BUT she had a messy room for a long time. As a parent, I tried a whole array of ways to instil in her the importance of keeping a tidy room but I failed dismally. I threatened to confiscate her electronic devices, I forbade her to entertain her friends at home, I enticed her with rewards, I bribed her with some store bought purchases, I threatened her with withdrawing her privileges, I physically went into her room and cleaned up for hours, I displayed alternating fits of anger, disappointment, sadness and frustration in varying degrees and intensity, I appealed humbly to her better nature but nothing seemed to work. Eventually, I resigned myself to just shutting her room door and just letting it be. It was about time that I faced the cold, hard truth that I had failed as a parent. Miserably. 

I closed her room door but couldn’t quite shut the messy room from my mind. With the passing of time, I tried to process this conflict in my head. Slowly, very slowly, I realised that this had nothing to do with my child being neat and tidy but everything to do with my need for control. As a modern woman who prides herself on being an effective and efficient homemaker despite still running three franchises, it was super important to me to have the whole home ( and this meant my daughter’s room too!), clean and pristine. If that one room looked dishevelled or disarranged, it altered the spic and span, showroom appearance of the rest of the house. 

It was me trying to exercise my superiority of control. It was her room after all - the only space where she could be unique, creative and her own person where she was in control. What right did I have to intrude into her domain? After this epiphany, I apologised to her about my constant nagging to tidy up her room and told her that she can be in full control of her room as long as she adhered to the general expectation of tidiness which applies to the rest of our home. Miraculously, with me not obsessing about her room, of her own volition, she did a Marie Kondo by getting rid of unused items, rearranging her closets and drawers, setting up a productive study section and succeeds today in keeping her room neat and orderly. If only I had this mental breakthrough much earlier!

As long as we draw the lines between hygiene and “messy”, we should not exert our expectations to their personal space and freedom. We could remind them to bring their dirty laundry out to be washed, to change their sheets at least once a week and bring out all used crockery by the next morning but apart from that we should respect their space in our new-found realisation that a messy room is emblematic of an adolescent age. 

So, while a messy room may irk you, maybe this is just the small stuff that we shouldn’t sweat about. When all things are said and done, let them look back at their teenage years as a time when you had their back. As time marches by, they may realise that if everything is in its designated place, they could be more productive. Or not. In time, their room will get cleaned. Or not. Who cares? At least we can cling to the hope that one day they will move out and vacate that room at which time we can charge in with sanitisers and detergents ablazing and detoxify and clean the living daylights of that room. But for now, it is better to shut the door and let it be.