It is unusual to enter my teenage daughter’s room without some degree of hazard. There are teetering piles of detritus. There are mugs with green liquid in them. There are sometimes surprising odours, not all of them pleasant. So why don’t I tell her to clean it up? Well, I do, occasionally, but not with much determination or hope of compliance, partly because I find the traditional objection to this kind of parental instruction hard to argue against — “It’s my room, what’s your problem?”
One can make the conventional response — “Actually, if you check the legal documents, you’ll find that, technically, it’s my room” — but this doesn’t get you very far and can take you down one of those logical rabbit burrows at the end of which inevitably lies, “Well, you didn’t have to have me in the first place did you?” The point is, their room is indeed, in spirit if not legally, their space. Maybe we should just leave them to wallow in it.
I suspect my wife thinks I’m lax for entertaining such views and I was tempted to agree, until my lack of resolve was stiffened by a recent article in the New York Times headlined ‘Should I make my daughter clean her room?’. The self-confessed control-freak mother answers the question with a rather reluctant, but finally resounding ‘no’.
She suggests that the “Jackson Pollock-inspired crash scene” that is her 15-year-old daughter’s room needs to be kept under control, but that the mother’s “impulse to tidy can be compulsive, a way to maintain control in the face of anxiety”.
It’s a sound insight. Part of the reason we want our children to clean their rooms is the same reason we want them to eat their greens. It is symbolic rather than logical. We worry about it because we have a low emotional tolerance of chaos, even other people’s chaos confined within four walls.
If you want to be less philosophical, you could argue that your children should maintain a tidy space because untidy spaces are inefficient and look ugly. But again, it’s not your space, so why worry? You can plead hygiene, but the number of teenagers suffering serious infections as a result of poor room-hygiene, so far as I am aware, remains remarkably low.
You could say that tidying is teaching them how to survive in the outside world, but I think that’s a rationalisation. Some children are tidy and some are not, and there’s nothing much you can do about it. Untidy people muddle through somehow — I know, because I’m one of them.
There are other good reasons to refrain from endlessly nagging teenagers about cleaning up their room. If my daughter is anything to go by, they work extremely hard at school and have little enough agency when they get home. Giving them some control and a space to call their own is psychologically important.
But there are limits. Once you discover rodents under the bedside table, some action needs to be taken. But more often than not, our response should be — let it go. As a psychologist quoted in the NYT article observed: “The more you make it an issue, the more you’ll prolong the problem.” Another psychologist made a different, but equally pertinent point. “What’s important for children is structure,” she said, “which is not necessarily the same thing as a clean room.”
If you need further convincing, read Anne Tyler’s wonderful book Tumble Tower. It’s about the beauty, or at least the necessity, of mess. The trouble is, it’s a children’s’ book — and it’s not children who need to read it. It’s us parents.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Tim Lott is a journalist and author. His latest book is Under the Same Stars.
