Helping Messy Teens Clean Up Their Acts

Nov. 19 -- The Kellys have a neat, pleasant house with lovely rooms — unless you dare to go upstairs and venture into the chambers of 14-year-old Sarah Kelly.

Sarah admits she had a housekeeping problem.

"My room is the epitome of messy," Sarah told Good Morning America. "There's clothes everywhere, magazines everywhere. The bed is never, ever made. I haven't made my bed in years."

Like many parents of teens, Meghan and Pat Kelly, were desperate to get Sarah to clean up her room. After checking out the problem, Good Morning America agreed to help come up with some solutions.

Tips For Parents

"It's like a fire hazard in there," Meghan Kelly said. "So it's very exasperating, frustrating."

The Kellys had tried everything to get their daughter to clean up her act.

Something to Holler About

"I definitely dread going in because it's I know that I'm going to have to holler," Meghan Kelly said. "I don't really like to holler. I don't understand why I have to holler about this."

When her parents take away her favorite things, Sarah usually becomes motivated to clean up.

"Some kind of drastic measure — no TV or no computer or something until she cleans her room," Pat Kelly said. "And it usually works."

But not for long. After a cleanup, the room quickly turned back into a disaster zone, as Good Morning America discovered when the show left its cameras running in Sarah's room for a week.

Her shoes were tossed in the corner. The clean clothes were thrown on the floor, where they get mixed up with the dirty ones. And more than once, Sarah was caught searching for missing items.

"Where did my sweatshirt go?" she said at one point.

Three Golden Cleaning Rules

Even Sarah knew that things were out of hand.

"It gets so big — it's just so time-consuming to have to clean it up," Sarah Kelly said. "But if I were more organized in the first place it wouldn't get like this."

Her mother said that she did not expect Sarah to become a neat freak, but she wanted to see some improvement.