The Tidying Song
We have a foster son who has been with us for over two years, who, since he joined our family, has grown from a child to a teenager. When we first met him, he had a lot of strong foundational life skills, like how to clean a bathroom and how to chop vegetables safely. He is really capable, and he can also be very considerate of others. But he is also a teenager who REALLY doesn’t like being told what to do and isn’t very aware of the mess that trails behind him. I like to wake up early to have some quiet space to read, pray, and write, and I would get SO annoyed when, in order to get my quiet corner set up, I’d have to shuttle gigantic BBQ restaurant cups to the sink, excavate the coffee pot from behind a stack of dishes, and relocate slightly stinky blankets and very stinky socks. This puttering would eat into my minutes of precious silence and make me very, very grouchy.
In an effort to get the teen to tidy, we tried:
lots of specific verbal reminders (but see above: the teen does not like to be told what to do)
fines for specific offenses (for example, -25 cents for dirty socks left in the den)
We had some limited success with these tactics, but they set up conflict, and my mornings still felt cluttered and chaotic.
This morning resentment was one of the problems I had in mind when I first read Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, a parenting book I've written about before that looks at some of the most ancient approaches to raising kids who are thoughtful and helpful. One of Doucleff’s huge insights from the people she features in the book is that kids are highly motivated by “togetherness,” and that one of the most effective ways to get them to grow in being more helpful is to invite them into tasks that we are already doing.
The value of togetherness immediately clicked for me. I was taught to do chores pretty independently as a kid. I was not a fan of cleaning then, and though I learned the skills, as an adult, I don’t have a whole lot of internal motivation to dust, vacuum, or scrub the grout, especially if things aren’t visibly dirty, and sometimes even if they are. When I clean now, it’s mostly from the social pressure I feel to look like I have a clean house.
I recognized that I was taking the same divide and conquer approach to chores that had worked with my family growing up, but because my husband and I weren’t leading the charge very consistently, it wasn’t going very far toward keeping an orderly house. I got my husband on board to try some other approaches, and we added a less-than-five-minute step to our evening routine that has dramatically improved my mornings: the Tidying Song.
We had a pretty good evening set-up with our teen already: screen time ends at 8pm and he showers before 8:30ish. We read aloud for about half an hour before he brushes his teeth and then gets himself to bed. The window between brushing teeth and making it into his room, which often featured some lollygagging anyhow, would be a perfect time to introduce some tidying.
For the last year or so, as soon as he finishes brushing his teeth in the evenings, one of us will tell Google to play “Get on Your Feet.” For the length of a Gloria Estefan song, we channel Leslie Knope, getting up and making some tidying happen. Because we all participate, it means that we collectively get ~10 minutes of work done, which is usually enough to eliminate the worst and most visible of the mess. Dishes are moved to the sink, toys are put back in their bins, the trash or a broken down Amazon box gets taken out. Laundry gets moved along, the dishwasher gets started, the thermometer that’s been sitting out since someone had the flu a week and a half ago gets sanitized and put away.
We often still have to prompt the teen to participate in the tidying song. (And who can blame him? It’s just a half step away from “Clean up, clean up” with Barney and friends.) But because we are all working together to make the space nicer for everyone, the request to put the Pokémon cards away please seems to be better received.
Not all of the chores get done every night. In fact, we usually only do the full bedtime routine 4-5 times a week. But when we do get to it, each of us accomplishes a couple of smallish tasks. In the morning, even if there is still some clutter, I’m not as resentful of it, because I know we’re working together to keep the house nice. And the major offenders like the hoodie that never got washed last week or the sticky ice cream bowl have been mostly banished from the morning quiet space. Ahh.
