Parenting Teens: The Clothes Battle
Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 12:00AM There is an upside to having just two kids in the house! Let the battle for a neat laundry room begin. We live in an old house that is seriously closet challenged. Ichabod lives in the basement. He doesn’t have a closet but since he would not store his clean clothes in it anyway that is not a problem. He has a dresser but it is too difficult to move the clothes 6 feet as the crow flies from the washroom to the dresser. He has a clean clothes basket in the washroom. Everyone has a clean clothes basket that in theory was supposed to travel from the basement every Tuesday night upstairs filled with clean clothes and return empty sometime before Monday when I start the wash. Reality is no one (meaning those under 21) toted those baskets up to their bedrooms where the closets and dressers yearn to store those clothes. The clothes would be tossed over the laundry room as people searched through the baskets for their clothes. By the end of the week the laundry room looked like a bomb exploded in it. To complicate the situation I couldn’t tell Princess’ clothes from Ichabod’s. On them Princess’ clothes looked very feminine and Ichabod very masculine, not to mention the sizes were very different. As I pulled them out of the dryer I couldn’t tell them apart.
Princess is now at college and I know exactly whose clothes are tossed over the laundry room. I am now thinking through the most effective plan to motivate Ichabod to keep his clean clothes in his basket.
Anyone have a clever suggestion?
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Reader Comments (7)
Personally, I would just stop washing them! Let him deal with dirty clothes for a little while OR (and I did this myself recently and it sent Nick in to a tizzy) I went in to his room and cleaned out his closet/dresser myself and got rid of stuff. I touched EVERYTHING! The boy was NOT happy but he now is picking up his stuff and taking care of it.
Lay down the LAW!
put his dresser in the laundry room. you can just put the stuff away and he's used to going to the laundry room anyway so it's no skin off his nose lol. okay, if you laundry room is like mine that is not an option, but a good thought.
Whooo Hoooo !
my suggestion is even more unbelivable -
put icabods dresser in the laundry room.
also his bed. that should take care of his laundry finding issues. Mwwahhhhh !!!!!
but seriously doh -
get some color coded 33 gal trash bins, two for each;
one for clean - one for dirty - marked by the lids.
Paint them the colors which match the colors of their rooms. put the clothes in the bins.
if they want them they can come get them from the laundry room. then when they are dirty they can put them back into the bins and have a visual queue as to when THEY NEED TO DO THEIR LAUNDRY.
besides if they stop doing it, you can move the bins out to the recycling area - which will quickly get the point across. sometimes Visuals Do More Than Words.
Yeah I'm Do It Yourself MOM...
here's proof - when hubby can't (doesn't want to) find a shoe himself; I put the other one up ontop of the closet shelf, above his head which makes him think. he then traces his path. the other shoe miraculously turns up.
never help them find anything easily - or you will become the finder and the minder. use your time more constructively and let them abuse less of it.
When my girls were ages 8 and 11, I got really sick of hearing "I don't have any clean clothes" when their only requirement was to bring them to the basement to be washed! So, I made them do their own laundry! This worked well with my older daughter, but the younger one, she'll go as long as possible before doing her laundry.
Pare down his clothing to exactly 5 complete outfits - 5 sets of underwear - 5 pairs of socks.
With fewer choices, he won't need to throw his laundry all over the room in order to find what he needs.
Also, if he is old enough to do his own laundry, now might be a good time for you to force him to take over that responsibility. It may be hard on you now, but it will make life easier for him (and any woman who may decide to marry him) later.
I would say make him start to do the laundry or tell him if it's not in the hamper it will not get washed. Stand behind this too. Also if he doesn't keep clean clothes where they belong make him wash every article of clothing laying around out of place. That's extra work he probably doesn't want to do. Or you can make him do all laundry in house for everytime you find clothes all over.
My girls are 3 and 7 and I was battling my oldest for quite a while just to make clothes get to the hamper. Everytime I did laundry I couldn't find half her clothes and rarely any socks. She kept asking me why she didn't have clean pairs of socks, well because I could never find them. Come to find out she was hiding her dirty clothes under bed in a corner, putting them back in dresser dirty, and hiding under the couch. She had many hiding spots. She has gotten much better now, she learned she had no clean clothes to choose from if they did not make it to hamper. She even had to wear mismatched socks just to have a clean socks on, I never find her clothes hiding anymore. I told her flat out I will not search for your clothes they make it to the hamper they get washed, they don't make it then they don't get washed. My youngest loves to help and even tries to help me fold the cloths.