Does anyone have a Jekyll & Hyde kid in terms of stuff around the house. Let me explain. My D19 finishing up the year has been working 20-26 hours a week while still in school. It has slowly grown during senior year. No sports senior year means making $$$. Anyway she busts her butt working and juggling a couple of jobs and different responsibilities at the jobs, but the minute she walks in the door it is like all motivation ends. I will just say it she is a slob. So much so that I won’t miss that aspect of her when she leaves in Aug. I know she isn’t getting paid to do stuff around the house, but man her room is always a mess. We have to bug her just to bring down dishes.
We had an unpleasant senior year & lots of attitude & misbehaving the summer before our youngest left for college.
I couldn’t wait to get her out of the house that August.
My understanding is this is common behavior.
Now that both kids are no longer living at home, the house has never been cleaner or more organized.
Lol well from the title I thought you were talking about my husband!
When my D worked and was in school, her room was quite messy, too. My philosophy was (once they were 11-12 I think?) they can keep their rooms any way they want. I rarely ever went in there. One son was very neat, daughter was a cyclone and hoarded cups, other son would have towel mountains in there. They were responsible for doing their own laundry so suffered the natural consequences if something they needed wasn’t clean when they needed it.
My daughter is now so hilarious, texts me frequently about cleaning her house and wanting things very neat. She definitely changed as she grew up.
Maybe this is one reason that mandatory military service or a form of heavily regimented public service would be a good idea.
I warned DD a week ago that the carpets are getting cleaned and people would be in her room. You can imagine her reaction!
My daughter is a slob too. I stopped fighting it if it was contained to her room and I could shut the door. If it seeps out into communal living area, I have a problem. She was home for 4 days between the end of her first year of college and leaving for study abroad and it looked like a small bomb went off in her room. I asked her not to leave it that way and she did a semi-decent job before she left but the door is still closed ; )
PS. her dorm room was much neater/organized
Checking for clarity…your daughter is going to school full time, and working a ton of hours?
I’d let this go as long as there isn’t food in her room.
Either that…or find a time nice a week for an hour…and give her a big black garbage bag and a laundry basket.
Mother to a slob, as well. (Actually, two of them, sadly) D is living in our basement as she finishes her grad degree; I don’t go down there much. S is off on his own so I don’t see his bedlam ever. It used to bug me because I’m on the tidy side, but I had to learn to shrug it off. There are worse vices.
My husband’s sisters tell me that he used to be a terrible slob. Now he’s a neat freak! He gets annoyed at my messiness.
My slob only tidied up when her now-husband insisted. Mom pressure had no impact. ?♀️
The summer before college can be tough. One speaker college speaker told us that one of her kids was so annoying that she wanted to call the college and say, “can you take her 6 weeks early?”.
Fyi - there is a “soiling the nest” term used a lot by parents in the same boat…
https://grownandflown.com/soiling-the-nest-teens-being-bad/
" We have to bug her just to bring down dishes."
I can deal with clutter and some clothes strewn about but we have a strict “no food in the bedrooms” rule unless you are sick. I just don’t think food belongs there and dirty dishes, etc. can attract pests.
I’ve always thought of the summer before college freshman year as nature’s way of letting the kid and the parents part with relief and no regrets.
I have 2 slobs also. One is staying in his apartment this summer for his internship but even when he was home for 3 days his room was a tornado. He was so bad in hs that his brother didn’t realize he had the same wood floors that are in his room. The other has claims he has unpacked the college boxes but really means that they’re all inside of his room and he’s just digging through to find what he needs. As long as I don’t have to see it, we’ll survive the summer. I do spend a day deep cleaning their rooms after they return to college in the fall and always end with a very satisfied sigh of relief.
@intparent said:
I suspect this will be the case for D2. Her serious BF may end up being her husband, and I don’t think he would be willing to put up with her mess. She’s going to have to get better about containing the two cats mayhem if she wants to have a happy marriage. And the clothes are going to HAVE to find the hangers or laundry bin quite a bit more often.
S20 was a slob until his senior year, when he got a girlfriend who wasn’t. Then suddenly he became a neat freak, and was generally really frustrated with S19 and the common areas they shared. S19 is still horrible. I know I’m bad (my wife isn’t, which is a fairly common source of friction) but I couldn’t live the way he does. God help whoever he rooms with next year.
S20 also was frankly a pain in the butt about everything his whole senior year. When it was time for him to go, the whole family was lined up to help him pack. We get along much better now than we did then, even when he is living at home. It was just time for all of us to move on to the next stage.
S19 on the other hand is going to be hard to see go. He is going farther, and other than being a slob is mostly pretty fun to live with. I think there will a hole in the family dynamic next year.
Remember when she went to daycare or pre-school and wept hysterically when you picked her up at the end of the day? She was exhausted from behaving well all that time, and now could let down her guard with you because you were safe. This is still true. She’s good all day at school and work, and when she gets home, she’s safe and doesn’t have to be perfect anymore. Yup it’s annoying - especially when all the plates and teaspoons have gone missing. But it is part of her whole learining-about-life process.