In an effort to encourage my children to clean their rooms and then keep them clean, I created an award. The award is a prize of their choice (parental approval required) won by having the cleanest room at the end of the week – provided the rooms are clean. Some prizes necessitate winning twice.
Interestingly, the award has been won – two weeks in a row – by Graham, age 7, and Louis, age 4. Graham needed two awards to win his Hexbug and Louis needed two awards to win a Link shield.
There have been weeks when no one has won because the rooms were simply NOT clean!
There has been some movement toward a cleaner room for Greg & Zeke, who share a room. Angelina loves her piles, so is farther away from a solid win.
AND, this past week, I completely changed it up again. Zeke was moved in with Louis and Graham into the room with Greg. Because…I’d been finding half empty cups of iced tea and chocolate milk on dressers (and behind clean towels in cupboards), bowls of food in drawers, under the sink in the bathroom, in storage tubs…it’s just plain GROSS! Of course, no one fesses up to the empty bowls and cups. So, my solution was to mix up the living arrangements so I could keep track of the offenders (yes, I do have an idea of ‘who’ is doing it, but they’d always blame the roommate). And, yes, my kids get plenty to eat, just not that kind of junk whenever they want.
It’s part punishment/consequence for poor decisions, part older sibling helping younger sibling learn to keep a clean room and make good choices.
I have no idea if it will work or even help, but something needed to be changed. Here goes.
