How to get your kid to WANT to tidy their room

Alt Text: A mother with brown hair holding a basket of laundry, smiling and pointing at her toddler who is smiling back with their eyes closed.

Kids bedrooms are disaster zones if they're left to their own devices, right? What if I told you that I could share how to get your kid to tidy their room, and want to do it in the first place?!

First, let me share a phrase that is used by parents everyday, that is actually really problematic: 'if/then' for example:

'IF you tidy your room, THEN we can go to the park' - this is a bribe!

'IF you don't tidy your room, THEN we won't go to the park' - this is a threat!

Now, there's no judgement here, we've all used this phrase - but what it does is take your child's focus away from experiencing any job satisfaction or pride for simply completing the task. This is called intrinsic reward, where how we feel about something is the reward itself. Instead it leads your child to look outside of themselves for reward or validation - this is called extrinsic reward.

Our society is a big reinforcer of extrinsic rewards: star of the week, dojo points, merits or demerits, pay rises and bonuses. Through this system our child learns that no matter how hard they try to do something they must wait for external recognition - for someone else to tell them that they did a good job.

And the problem with extrinsic rewards is that the good feeling we receive doesn't last long and we are then pushing to seek the next validation. We see this in adults who receive a pay rise, only to then feel as though that isn't enough, and seek another, and another. We are left with an overarching sense of dissatisfaction as rewards cannot be given to us by others, fast enough.

Alt text: a young boy sat at a school desk writing in a notebook with a pencil.

Imagine being 6years old and trying your absolute best on a piece of handwriting practice, only for another child to receive the 'leaps in learning' certificate in assembly that week. How would that feel? You'd probably feel overlooked, not good enough and ultimately demotivated to put in as much effort in the future. This is not to take away from the achievement of the child who did get the certificate, more to highlight the flaw with relying on extrinsic rewards.

Equally your child may be recognised for something that they don't value themselves - maybe they are given an award for being a brilliant reader, but reading comes easily to them so it's not something their proud of, sure they will most likely appreciate the award and feel special, but do they care about the achievement itself? Is it truly meaningful to them?

Alt Text: a young girl smiling and receiving a trophy from an adult male

So, what do we do? How do we help our children to build up their own intrinsic reward system? Well it's actually pretty simple - we acknowledge their effort. Turn your attention, and theirs to the amount of energy, focus, tenacity, effort that they are applying for any given task and pair it with a check in of how they feel afterwards.

Let's say that they're learning some spellings - notice how hard they are working, talk to them about how you can see they're trying their best and that is a really impressive use of some important life skills. BEFORE they have their spelling test ask them how they feel about their effort, see if they can identify a sense of pride or accomplishment. Now, even if they sit the test and get 1/10 it doesn't matter - the score is extrinsic, and we are focussing on intrinsic. If we try our best at something we can feel really proud of our achievement. We don't need a perfect score to tell us we are good enough. I know that it will likely matter to your child if they get 1/10 but we can try our best to dismantle these societal expectations from within. By practising this we are teaching our children to know their worth and values in a way that is really meaningful.

Alt text: A child dressed in coat and hat, climbing up a climbing frame in an urban play park.

But what does this have to do with tidying bedrooms and going to the park I hear you ask!

Well, if we can teach our children to recognise job satisfaction and pride in taking ownership in tasks then they will naturally be motivated to do things that benefit themselves such as tidying their room... stay with me... Your child may not see the need to do it and may also feel utterly overwhelmed by the task (which is developmentally appropriate, by the way) so will need your support to get started and to remain on task. However, we can still phase out the threats and bribes with a new substitute, our new best friend: 'now/let's'

'Now that you have tidied your room, let's go to the park'.

Using now/let's regularly will teach your children that there is always intrinsic reward where they put value, and sometimes this can also be celebrated with extrinsic rewards. It's important to add that extrinsic rewards are not guaranteed, nor are they alluded to before the task (read bribe/threat) and that recognition of the intrinsic reward must come first. This order of events will really help to embed the learning of listening to their own personal sense of achievement, pride and success.