White Knuckle Parenting: Clean Your Room!

My kids are in charge of cleaning their own rooms. In order to earn certain privileges, their rooms have to be neat. Unfortunately, their version of neat and mine are two very different things. They think things are neat if they have a path to their Lego table. I think things are neat if all of their action figures are lined up in neat rows, ready to be looked at but not touched.

We find a middle ground in their version of cleaning, which is to scoop up everything that is on the floor and put it on some sort of surface—shelf, dresser, storage box, bed. When I swing by to see if they've cleaned, my quick glance reveals a clean floor in a seemingly clean room. It is only upon closer inspection that I find piles of books on top of Legos on top of pajamas and I realize that I've been duped.

Honestly, most of the time their quick pickup is sufficient. If they are comfortable in their environment and I don't have to look at it when I wander by, I'm okay with their haphazard tidying. I am, however, somewhat of a control freak, and occasionally I insist on doing a deep clean and organizing session in their rooms. This periodic cleaning also serves as a way to ensure that I will not one day be surprised by an ant farm living on a Popsicle stick in someone's sweater drawer.

I embarked on one of these sessions in the room that my two youngest share last weekend, throwing away an entire garbage bag of trash and packing up two trash bags of items to donate. I also picked up approximately seven million and six Legos.

My favorite part of cleaning my kids room—aside from finishing—is throwing stuff away. I used to have a hard time getting rid of my kids' things, but by this point in my clutter-filled life, I practically giggle with glee as I'm doing it.

I have some rules I go by when deciding what to get rid of:

Have you always hated a toy? Into the trash bag with it! Do you regularly find pieces from a particular toy all over the floor? Let some more responsible child enjoy it! Do they only read that book when they find it in the discard pile during one of your deep cleans? This time you should hide it at the bottom of the bag! Are you surly after cleaning the room for two hours? Everything in that corner goes to the NCC!

When I get into this mindset, I am a machine. If I don't know what it is, if it's missing a piece, or if it is broken, it gets tossed. There is a caveat to this however. Once I throw away that mysterious/incomplete/broken item, I will of course almost immediately discover that it is a crucial piece to a beloved toy/find the other part/figure out how to fix it, all too late.

I found some interesting things in my kids' room last weekend, including a pocket knife, which disturbed me a little bit. I removed that immediately. I also took a long hard look at a stuffed tiger that one of my kids loves, but that plays the most obnoxious song about candy when you punch it in the stomach—I mean, lovingly poke him in the tummy. In the end, I decided it would be cruel to "lose" the tiger.

I did, however, manage to get rid of a fair number of clothes. When you have three boys and you are cleaning out the youngest's clothes drawers, it is remarkable how few clothes are suitable for donation. I found several pairs of pants that looked as if they'd been housing a colony of moths for years. I also found at least one 4T shirt, which is surprising considering my youngest is almost 7.

As I cleaned from one side of the room to the other, my children fell in behind me, taking out what I had just put away. Naturally, I slapped their books and toys out of their hands, pushed them out the door, and refused them admittance to their room for the rest of the day.

I seriously considered making them sleep in the hallway that night. I was afraid if I let them back in, they might try to touch their stuff, which would start this whole process all over again. After a next-morning swing by, everything still looked okay, although I fear that if I do a closer inspection I will find that I have been duped yet again.

Jean, a.k.a. Stimey, writes a personal blog at Stimeyland; an autism-events website for Montgomery County, Maryland, at AutMont; and a column called Autism Unexpected in the Washington Times Communities. You can find her on Twitter as @Stimey.