How Do You Get Your Kids to Clean Their Rooms?

My ex-wife waged endless war over the mess in our kid's bedrooms.

She was a master of command and control who viewed every tiff over cleaning as the final battle of Armageddon.  The kids felt much the same, countering with guerrilla tactics.  They did as they pleased and only withdrew when confronted by superior forces.  As for me, I had no desire to enter into an un-winnable test of wills.

Finally I interceded with a lesson I leaned in human behavior years ago while living in an old granary on a bluff overlooking Wisconsin County Road QQ.

County QQ had a reputation as a great place to cruise.  The road wound and rolled like a silky black roller-coaster through the hardwood valleys of Western Wisconsin.  The route was stunningly scenic and people came from great distances to drive it as a meditation in motoring.

The problem was, what is good for some people is often not so good for others. Because when I lived there, people left behind more than good feelings on their day trips, they left their trash.

Like my kids, I could live with the trash.  Even though the beer bottles and pop cans drifted in the ditches deeper than snow, I didn't mind it.  The color was delightful.  It brightened up the drab whiteness of winter and the green sameness of summer.

My neighbors thought different.  To them trash was trash and they didn't like it one bit.

The thing was, like my ex, these folks could not convince the steady stream of beer swilling, junk food munching motor heads who roared the length of County Road QQ - that scenery could be something other than a receptacle for discarded packaging.

They were determined to stop it, but as good Midwesterners they started out polite. 

A couple of them got together and discreetly posted a modest white sign bearing the simple message "Please, No Littering". 

That didn't work.

Politeness works best with courteous people and my neighbors obviously did not understand their audience. They soon rectified this misunderstanding by dropping the word "Please".

That didn't work any better.

For the cruisers, a sign standing in a pile of litter reading "No Littering" speaks more to irony than to matters of compliance.

The next attempt was downright terse.  The word "No" vanished into the white background and a large red swath encircled the word "Littering".  A blood red slash stroked an imperative "NO" across that.

That didn't work either.

The last straw came when a trickster covered the red with white and slightly modified the lettering, resulting in a sign which instructed visitors to "Litter".

That autumn, the quarterly Township meeting was a prelude to Armageddon.  My neighbors were literally up in arms and Western Wisconsin that is never good.  You have to realize in that region a gun is never far away and something had to be done before people started plinking at the litterbugs.

Then old Bill Dahler got an idea and he said so by muttering - "Got'er an idea."

Now when Bill talked people listened because Bill rarely said anything and when he did, he was worth listening to.

The guy had a face as pinched as a Chinook salmon and when he spoke the knob of his chin clacked against the hook of his nose like the snapping of a pliers, but all he said was - "I'll take care of er'"

And that was that.

Not much happened all week, and then on Friday Bill's old Chevy appeared adjacent to the "Littering" sign.

He dug a brush and some paint out of the truck bed and worked on the sign for a while.  When he was done the word "Littering" was no more.  So was the slash.

He left the big red circle, but he added another inside and brushed in a red dot in the center.  When he was done - he had transformed the sign into a target with a big red bulls-eye.

The next morning, a small heap of Michelob bottles and Coke cans materialized under the sign.  Apparently the cruisers and day-trippers got quite a kick out of hitting the target with their trash. In the following days, the heap grew and grew until it almost hid the sign.

The target got quite a reputation, so much so that it attracted itinerant recyclers who came by periodically to pick the pile clean.

Within a year County QQ was devoid of the color of litter, it reverted to the white blandness of winter and the green sameness of summer punctuated only by the occasional native flower or stalk of wild asparagus.

And without all that trash to liven things up, everyone faded back into the same old, same old of everyday rural life.

And so it was with my kids.

Like Bill Dahler, I knew the secret of social engineering.  My son sleep on sheets patterned with camouflage, my daughter snoozed on designs more floral.

I switched their sheets.  

Then I made it clear that until the rooms were cleaned and remained so, the bedding arrangement would also remain so.

Immediately the kids made their beds.  After all - their friends spent time in their rooms and nothing is more motivating for a preteen than a snarky peer.  From there it was not much of leap to solve the incongruity between a made bed and a messy floor.

And.... without all that trash to liven things up, we all faded back into the same old, same old of everyday family life.

All it took was a nudge.

© Greg Schiller, 2008

Author: Greg Schiller