As a correlary:
If your child isn’t cleaning a room to your standards,
1) ensure they know HOW to clean. This is not a one & done lesson. Start them with a no-judgement program like Unfuck Your Habitat.

People aren’t born knowing how to be tidy. And observation isn’t enough.

2) Ask your child to articulate their view on their space. Your child may be super-visual and needs stuff where they can see it. They may feel insecure because their stuff has disappeared on them or been taken/broken.
Your child is allowed to have purely sentimental objects.

3) Recognize that disorder can be a coping mechanism for depression, attention deficits (most especially the inattentive variety), dissociation due to trauma, or executive dysfunction.
These are NOT disobedience or defiance.
Your kid’s brain may work differently. Get an eval.

4) Set functional ground rules, like “no open containers” or “no perishable food” or “water/sparkling water is fine, but nothing with sugar”.

But recognize that if a child has been food insecure or shamed about food, that child is MORE likely to hide food and hide their eating.

5) It’s not about you. If your kid’s room isn’t to your standards, it’s not because your child wants you to suffer. Your kid isn’t spending their adolescence practicing their evil genius on you.
Your kid has a full time job: Growing up. Learning how the world works. They’re busy.

6) And time management is a skill — one that is exponentially harder for kids existing in trauma, who have experienced trauma, who have an attention deficit or who process information differently. It is not in-born. (There are some parts of the brain that don’t even do time.)

7) just because you’ve been around them N years, doesn’t mean they’ve experienced it as N years.
Adult brains tend to frame teenagers as someone who has had a long time to learn a thing, but from the teen’s perspective, the teen just got here.
Think of your kid as a new hire.

8) And just because you taught your kid’s older sibling to do something doesn’t mean you’re done teaching this lesson. This stuff doesn’t filter outwards through osmosis.
Sorry. It sucks having to teach the same thing every year.

Teens are new here. Just keep that in mind.

This thread goes with this one.
https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1304126594181668865?s=21 https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1304126594181668865