Top 10 Room Cleaning Tips

1. Be a good role model.  If you want your children to learn to pick up after themselves, care for their possessions and live in an orderly environment…You got it!  You need to set the example.  If you take something out and use it, then you need to put it away.  Children are much more resistant to do things that are clearly not being done by their parents.
2. Establish a routine.  Make picking up their rooms a part of your children’s night-time routine, along with baths, teeth-brushing and story time.  This way they will go to sleep in a calm environment and wake up to start their day amidst order, rather than chaos.
3. Break down the task. When told to clean their room or pick up the toys, your children may feel the task to be insurmountable.  Standing in the middle of the room seeing toys, clothes and books all over the place is overwhelming.  Help your children learn to break down the task by identifying specific items to pick up first, second, etc.  Teaching them to put all the blocks in the bin, and then after that all the books on the shelf, and so on, makes the task seem more do-able.
4. Limit items.  Oftentimes, the amount of toys in a child’s room could help fill Santa’s sleigh.  However, owning these possessions and having access to them are two different things.  If clean up becomes overwhelming due to the sheer volume of ‘stuff,’ then try limiting the number of toys that they have access to at any given time.  You could even try rotating their choices from week to week.  Or, require that they put a certain number of toys away, before being given access to others.
5. Teach organization.  Organization is a skill…which many people just don’t possess.  Help your children learn from the time that they are young.  Ask them to help with household chores, such as putting a pot in the cabinet or a sock in the drawer.  Teach that everything has its place.  Provide bins, hampers, drawers, etc. to help keep toys and books organized in their rooms.  This way, your children learn where to put things when told to, ‘clean up your room.’
6. Make it a game.  Helping younger children with the clean up task can be turned into a game.  Timers are good for playing beat the clock.  Or you could race them to the finish line as they pick up the dolls while you pick up the puzzle pieces.
7. Teach while cleaning.  There are many ways you can turn pick up time into learning time.  Younger children can learn to count, and identify colors as they hand you the requisite items.  Siblings can learn cooperation as you praise them for working together.  Older children can learn how to vacuum, dust and organize closets and drawers.
8. Teach self-evaluation.  Chances are your children have a different definition of being ‘done’ with clean-up than you have.  You might look in their rooms and have the immediate urge to point out the seven things that are still strewn over the floor.  But…help them evaluate the situation for themselves.  Ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?”  Learning to evaluate and scrutinize their performance are lessons to use in many situations throughout their lives.
9. Set deadlines. Deadlines come in two forms.  The first is to clearly inform your children that before they can do _____, they need to clean their rooms.  If ____ is an on-going activity such as watching TV or playing outside, then the amount of time they would have to do these activities depends upon how quickly they pick up.  If ____ is a scheduled activity such as a party, then their attendance will be determined by whether their rooms are cleaned in time.  The second form involves giving your children a certain amount of time to complete the task.  If it is not done by then, you will come in and, without comment, remove the items that are still not put away.  These deadlines should be non-negotiable.
10. Pick and choose your battles.  For older children and teens, room cleanliness may or may not be the most pressing issue at hand.  Many, many parents decide to ease up on the room requirements, and tighten up on issues that they deem more immediate.  This is definitely a personal choice with neither a right or wrong way to decide.  Should you decide to loosen up, you might consider two things.  The first is to set minimal rules, such as: no food/dishes/wrappers remaining in the room; no wet towels left on the floor or the bed; the only laundry that gets done are the clothes in the hamper.  And the second thing to consider….Close the door!