Helping Messy Teens Clean Up Their Acts
Nov. 19, 2002 -- 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.
"I don't expect it to be perfect. That's not my goal," she said. "She's a teenager, she should have some freedom. But I would like to be able to find a happy medium with her."
Good Morning America's Parenting Contributor Ann Pleshette Murphy says that it is important to let kids make some decisions about their personal space — especially during the teen years, when they need to assert their independence.
But there are three basic clean-up rules that every parent should insist on:
1. No food or dirty dishes in the room. They can attract bugs.
2. Wet towels and dirty clothes need to go into the hamper because mold and mildew are a health hazard. 3. Clear the floor to prevent accidents.
Finding a Middle Ground
Since Sarah couldn't even find the floor in her bedroom, GMA invited Amanda Sullivan, a personal organizer (ThePerfectDaughter.com) to help.
"I think the parent needs to ask, not tell," Sullivan said. "If the parent can find out what the child's vision is, then maybe they can find a middle ground that will work for both of them."
Sometimes, Mom is the last person who should volunteer to help. If mother and daughter are constantly butting heads, then ask a friend, an aunt, an older sibling or anyone who can remain neutral to lend a hand, Sullivan advises.
It worked for Sarah, who came up with her own plan, with help from Murphy and Sullivan.
"We're going to purge, we're going to get it down to as little as we can," Sarah Kelly said. "We're going to sort, give everything a home and we're going to label it."
They used three large boxes to help separate the keepers, the giveaways and the trash. They sorted and cleaned and sorted some more, including clothes, make-up, magazines and bears.
To Sarah's surprise, she gave tons of her own stuff the thumbs-down, opting to give it away.
Inside her room, an old baker's rack and metal bins were replaced by easy-to-assemble shelves with lots of space for accessible, attractive containers.
She labeled the new bins so that they would not become as cluttered as the old. She then added a shoe holder and hooks to the closet, finishing off with a good vacuuming of that seldom-seen carpet.
Five hours later, Sarah's room looked like new.
"I still can't believe it's the same room," said Meghan Kelly.