Embracing the process
I spent my afternoon 'helping' the youngest six children clean the two rooms they share. I didn't really plan on spending the entire afternoon on this task; I really thought a couple of hours and we'd be done. Clearly, I hadn't really looked to carefully at the state of their rooms except to note that they needed some cleaning. Well, that was an understatement. Six bags of garbage, some recycling, and at least five large bags of stuff to donate came out of one room in particular. It is much, much better now and vacuuming was even able to happen.
Usually I let them take care of their rooms without worrying unduly about how tidy they are are. I don't have to live in them and because of the layout of the house, I don't even have to walk past them to go other places. At some point, though, I find I need to step in and really do a thorough cleaning. When everyone was younger, this often meant that I would find some way to distract them such as an outing somewhere, so that I could be alone and really get things organized... throwing away garbage, purging outgrown or unused toys, etc. Then, as everyone got older, they would be the ones to clean, but often the disaster was so bad that they didn't know where to start. It was overwhelming. This is why I took to sitting in the room and directing the cleaning, offering guidance such as, "Why don't you find all the books and put them where they go?" or "Get a garbage bag and pick-up all the scraps of paper of the floor" or "I think you need to pull out everything shoved in that corner and sort it out." I truly think children are incapable of actually seeing corners of a bedroom.
Today's cleaning was of the second sort, children cleaning and me directing. Since my older children all know how to clean a room and do a pretty good job of living in fairly tidy surroundings, I know that there is both hope at the end of the tunnel and that this system does work. It's just not a very time efficient activity. We worked one to six today except for a teatime reading break. Would it have gone faster if I had shooed them out and just done it myself? Oh yes, most certainly.
I saw an article that someone posted a couple of days ago titled something like, "The 8 Skills you Child Needs to Have by Age 8" or something along those lines. The skills mentioned in the article were good... basic kitchen skills, bathroom cleaning, pet care, bedroom cleaning, basic hand sewing, etc. They are actually all skills that we introduce our children to and help them to learn. The trouble is no child is really going to have these skills by age 8. Sure introducing them by age 8 is great, but it is the beginning of a long path to proficiency. Along the way, there is a lot of support by parents in the background. There is also a lot of less-than-competent effort with many jobs done very imperfectly and taking a lot more effort than the parent just doing it themself.
You can't just show you child once how to clean the bathroom and expect them to have mastered it. It doesn't work that way. It is more like, you show them how to clean the bathroom, then you help them clean the bathroom for a while, then you watch them clean the bathroom while you watch, then you have them clean the bathroom with you coming back to check the job them did and asking them redo any particularly poorly done jobs (and dealing with the less than happy attitudes that come with such a request). It takes a long time and it is a lot of work. It doesn't always make people happy. It really is much, much easier to clean the bathroom yourself... or the bedroom or load the dishwasher or do the load of laundry, etc.
Parenting is a process and the focus is no the process. Our Instagram world encourages people to see things backwards, with the perfect product being the important part. If perfection... or even photos to make it appear you have perfection... is your goal, you're going to be disappointed and frustrated, wondering what the heck is wrong with your child. Nothing is wrong with your child, but probably something is wrong with your expectations. Just because they do a shoddy job of cleaning their room at 8 (or 12 or 14) doesn't mean that you have failed or that they will be perpetually living in sloth. It just means that they are still developing these skills and as a parent you need to figure out how to support them where they are and how to help them reach the next level of competency.
This is why I spent all afternoon watching my children do a job I could have done in a fraction of the time. They need me to help them know what the next step is; to see what they have missed and how to remedy it. They also need to experience doing the job for themselves. Cleaning is work and takes effort; it is not something that just happens every so often. They need to be part of the process.
Yes, the rooms were pretty bad. But you know what? That doesn't make me a failure, either. We have other things that are priorities, most often in the relationship and experience realms. While I like to have tidy bedrooms, I am also unwilling to spend too much of my day worrying about them. I will ask them to straighten up and when the become to out of control, I'll help them sort it out. A perfect house is not equivalent to being a perfect parent. I'd much rather have a relationship with my children than a relationship with my house.
And while I was working on this with the younger half, my uber-competent oldest was making pies for Thanksgiving tomorrow.
I have two new articles published.
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