Messy Kid Room

The dreaded chore – the cleaning of the room.  This is just one example of something I knock heads with my daughter on.  Additional battlegrounds include, but are not limited to, brushing teeth, going to bed, putting on shoes, getting dressed, and eating food.  I never know what the trigger is going to be, and I never know if it will be a peaceful day or a continuous tantrum day.  In the above example, her room is not so bad, you can see the floor!  I tidied up a little bit in an attempt to at least get her started; and there is the problem – getting her started in first place.  I have to confess it rarely happens in the case of cleaning her room.  99.9% of the time, I end up doing it.  The few instances she has made any iota of effort to put things away were the result of extremely traumatic days when we all ended up in tears and total exhaustion at the end of an all-day standoff.  Maybe I should be made of tougher stuff, but I can’t realistically go through days like that on a regular basis.  If I did, life would come to a complete halt, and I would be a prisoner in my home.  Oddly enough, she will clean up her toys at school voluntarily.

I have to make her bed when she is occupied doing something else.  If I make her bed with her in her room, she will just jump on it, roll around,  sit there like a log, or worse, fight me.  I know that sounds completely ridiculous that I have to make my kid’s bed in stealth-mode. I have learned to pick and choose what behaviors to go after to correct.  This choice comes after spending thousands on pediatric neurologists and therapists bills.  Let’s not forget the hundreds of dollars on behavior books I was told to read.  Believe me, I read every word of every book I was told to read.  I also tried with all my being to implement their strategies consistently.  My daughter could care less.  Time-out, reward charts, poker chips, taking toys away, holding back privileges like t.v., having to earn fun activities, etc.  The maximum time these things worked for was about four days, then she got bored.  Her response,”So what?  I don’t care.” She genuinely could care less. I’ve also tried more old-fashioned methods, they only make the situation a thousand times worse and my daughter even more defiant.  No book, doctor, or therapist thus far has come up with a reasonable solution.  The only thing I kept being told repeatedly was that my child is extra bright, extremely defiant, and extraordinarily stubborn.  Yes, I know, I didn’t really need someone with a medical degree to discover this.  The extra bright part gets emphasized as a reason for the defiance and stubbornness.  My issue is that she still needs to behave right and get things done, bright spark or not.

For a while, I sent her to play therapy.  I was made to believe that play therapy would get at the root of the problem somehow and make her more cooperative.  During play therapy with a reputable expert, she ran mental circles around him and nothing improved.  She did or said whatever she had to in order to play a game, and it all ended when she walked out the door.  Another behaviorist admitted that there wasn’t really anything that could be done but my own trial and error.  So I finally stopped draining the family bank account, and I’m still working on figuring it all out.

So far, keeping myself calm, keeping her busy with school and camp, taking her to ice skating and karate, trying desperately not to yell, and just waiting for her to mature are the best solutions.  When my mother often asks me ,”Why does she act like this?”, I’ve learned the best answer is, “That’s the way God made her.”  I’m the one who has to learn to get creative to motivate her in a positive way.  My silver lining is that my daughter generally behaves very well in public. I affectionately refer to it as her public persona.  I am truly thankful for it though I don’t know the reasons why it’s so different from behavior at home.   I haven’t come up with a solution for getting her to clean her room. I may never get her to clean her room.  My job is to keep trying anyway.