![]() ![]() INDEX TO PAST COLUMNSAugust 5, 1996 You can't teach your child to be neat with pleas, threats, bribes, or punishments. ![]() Your Turn: Send us your ideas on this topic, and we'll post them on Family Planet soon. ON WEDNESDAY: Should a bright child go to kindergarten a year early?![]() If you have a question or concern about your school-age child, send it to us in an e-mail message, and we'll forward it to Jan Faull.
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What a Mess![]() I've tried everything. I've begged, praised, cajoled, taken away her allowance, bribed, and punished. I've made her stay in after school and forbidden her to have friends over. This has all been to no avail. I've tried cleaning up with her, giving her a deadline, setting a clock, offering a reward: Nothing! She's such a precious, wonderful child--the middle between two brothers--and we get along great except for this bone of contention.
Messy rooms can be a chronic problem that begins early and lingers on and on. The cause generally depends on the age of the child. Teenagers may be declaring their independence, but younger children simply don't know where to start or what to do because they haven't had to follow the same rituals again and again. Repetition makes rituals automatic.
Neatness School Even if the disorder is confined to her room, it's still a family problem, because her room is part of the house. By keeping it so messy she's polluting both the family space and her own, as surely as someone who smokes cigars or uses foul language.
Habit Forming You'll also have to be in the room with your child while she cleans, not to fuss or to do the work but to oversee it and, incidentally, to keep her from getting lonely or distracted.
Step by Step First have her clear the clutter from the smallest space, like the night table, and then have her move on to the bureau top, the chair, the shelf, the desk. If her work is broken into steps, the job won't seem monumental. Congratulate her when she finishes each task, without once reminding her that this wouldn't be necessary if she kept her room clean in the first place. That's obvious.
The Stacking Technique It will be easier for her if she has her own hamper or pillowcase for dirty clothes and open shelves for toys, since a toy chest breeds confusion. And it will be easier for you if you stash about a third of the less-used toys, dolls, and animals in a cardboard box, to live on the closet shelf for a couple of months. A child takes better care of rotated toys because they seem special when they reappear.
Bedtime Maintenance In the morning she puts away her pajamas and makes her bed so she can have breakfast, and she has breakfast so she can go to school. You check her room before she eats and make her do it if she hasn't. This may make her late once or twice, but she'll soon learn. When you're 7, school is so important you don't want to miss even part of it.
Rewards, Not Bribes For the clutter all children strew about the house, consider using a Gunny Bag, as described in Teaching Children Responsibility, by Linda and Richard Eyre. A laundry sack, which you've decorated like a monster, unexpectedly swoops down from the attic to gobble up any clothes and toys that are left about and spits them out in a heap on Saturday for everyone to retrieve and put away.
About Marguerite Kelly.
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