Cleaning with Teens: It Doesn’t Have to Be a Struggle!

Each stage of parenting comes with its own set of challenges. Perchance, the adolescent/teenage years are one of the harder ones because your kids are at an age where they want to be more self-determining, make their own decisions and live a little defiantly! Apart from this, face it, teens would much rather spend hours in front of a screen than to spare 20minutes of their free time to clean!

Yes, it’s challenging to get your teens to ‘want’ to clean; though, it’s significant that they do it anyway. Mainly when it comes to bedrooms, no teen should be acceptable to live like there’s been a tornado in their room! If you stimulated them to pick up their things and put them away when they were littler, there’s no purpose why they shouldn’t be cleaning and organising now as teens! With that understood, here are some tried and true tips to guide you through cleaning with teenagers.

Don’t Yell, Plead

Let’s be real, no one enjoys being yelled at, especially teenagers! Consider using a different tactic - it will be more beneficial. Walk your teens through a day in the life of a mother or father and explain how much responsibilities and work you go through on a daily basis. Make them understand how tiring it is and plead with them to make things a little easier for everyone by helping out around the house. The ‘guilt’ approach is a lot more effective than yelling at your kids to get things done.

Encourage Decluttering

Adolescences hold on to a lot of jumble for sentimental reasons (some of us do that as adults too). Though it’s imperative to be sympathetic of this, you need to draw the line somewhere! For example, keeping old gift tags/birthday cards from loved ones and friends is fine; on the other hand, holding on to junk jewellery that’s probably rusted or broken or collecting old school books, is not. Encourage the habit of disposal or donating unnecessary items.

Help Out When You Can

Humans primal nature leads us to be motivated when a reward or prize is offered. We see this basic feature when kids and teens alike have an incentive every time they help mum (or dad) out. This teaches bad lessons and isn’t practical. Hence, the best thing to do is make up a weekly schedule for cleaning/chores with a reward or allowance at the completion. Another of our primal instincts is if we do 2 or 3 things for the day leaving us less stress & overwhelmed. Statistics have shown that chores will be completed more commonly when they are scheduled, not saddled in one hour blocks.

It should be mentioned that every child and family are unique to themselves and a generic calendar may not work for your teen’s situation. Parent’s please remember, your children haven't fully developed their coping mechanisms and can get anxious very quickly. And another one parents, teens too run tight schedules with school work, sport commitments least to say all the fun they MUST have growing up!

Therefore, it’s okay to hire help to maintain a clean home; however it is still important to:

· Encourage teens to clean up after themselves

· Work together as a family to keep things neat and tidy in the home.

@cleanslatebondi

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