During one of my Parenting Workshops I noticed a young mother sitting at a desk in the front row of the room.  She looked very, very tired.  She didn’t seem much interested in the content of the workshop and at one point she put her head down on the desk.  And I thought she might be ready to doze off.  Later in the workshop another mother was concerned about her kids making a mess around the house and not picking up for themselves.

Well, our tired mother must have heard a battle cry because she immediately perked up.  She looked around and then she looked right at me and asked, "Yeah.  When are they finally going to learn to pick up after themselves?" Mom was now energized.   She began to tell the group that she had 3 kids at home and she was sick and tired of all the picking up and cleaning she had to do.  She said that the work seemed endless.   She talked about how her work began at 6:30 in the morning preparing breakfast.  And once the food was on the table the food began to fall off the table.  She said that she spent the entire day with mini- vacs,  brooms, dust pans and cleaning sponges.

She said that by 9:00 at night all the kids were finally asleep.   But this was not her time to rest.  She just shifted into her next clean-up.  Her first evening job was to clean the bathroom after the kids had taken their baths.  She said she was on a first-name basis with all the towels, socks, shirts, slacks and underwear.   Then the tub.  And then the sink.  And last was the dirty mirror..

Then downstairs to the kitchen. Clean up the mess from the evening snack.  Clean up the toys and books in the living room.  Finally,  the house was clean.  But mom said she felt no satisfaction because she knew that tomorrow morning the mess and then the  clean-up would begin again.  And she was exhausted and she was fed-up with the whole cleaning thing.
Mom looked around the room for some direction.  But the best she could get was a lot of other mothers nodding their heads in agreement.

Then one of the parents turned to me and asked me the same question, "When do kids begin to pick up after themselves?"

We kicked the topic around a bit.  And then I told them the story about my son, Ross,  and his friend, Richard.

Richard had done very well in the business world so he was able to buy a starter-house mansion when he got married.  Richard and his wife held a "super bowl" party as their first open house.  I remember coming late to the party and couldn’t find a chair.  Ross went outside and found a folding chair for me.  And as he carried the chair across the room the legs of the chair were dripping mud across the new floor.

When Richard saw the trail of mud on his beautiful, new floor he became very upset.  And since Ross  was a homeowner he also became upset.  They both quickly found sponges and rags and got right down  on their hands and knees to clean up the mess.

I was kind of laughing to myself as I watched these two new homeowners down on their hands and knees taking care of the mud spill.  I began thinking about how important this mess would have been if it had happened in their house when they were 10 years old.  I don’t think either one of the boys would have even noticed the mud.  And I know it would have taken a lot of effort to get them to admit responsibility for the mess.  And even more effort to get them to go thru the motions of cleaning the floor.

As parents we would like to think that children share our interest in keeping the house clean and neat.  But these kids aren’t homeowners.  We are the homeowners.  Our names are on the mortgage.    We usually plan to stay in the home for a long time.  And we want to live in comfort and keep our home in good shape.
The kids usually see themselves as transients who will be staying only a short time in our house before they move on.  They don’t act like landlords.  They act more like renters.  And to answer the mother in our workshop, the kids will start to pick up the house when it’s theirs.

Two of my boys are now homeowners and I hear them saying the same things to their children as I said to them when they were kids, "Come on kids, this place looks like a bomb hit it.  Let’s get this place cleaned up.  Whose toys are these?  Whose books are these?  I want everything in the toybox before we go upstairs."

As parents we are always afraid that our kids will grow up to be slobs who will live in a filthy cave.  But most of our kids will do just fine taking care of their homes once they leave our house and acquire their own living space.