The Way This Mom Got Her Teen To Clean Her Room Is Sheer Brilliance
A teen had to earn her things back after she refused to clean her room
Sometimes you get to be the fun parent, but every once in a while, you’ve got to lay down the law. That’s exactly what one mom did after she got tired of her daughter refusing to clean her room, and her idea for a punishment was so genius, it’s going viral.
Alice Velásquez of Bargersville, Indiana, wrote on Facebook last week that she was tired of telling her teenage daughter to clean her room, so she decided to bag up all of the teen’s belongings and make her buy them back.
“What do you do when you are done telling your teenage daughters to stop letting their room look like homeless people live there?” she writes. “You put everything (yes everything) into plastic bags and sell it back to them for $25 a bag (and they have to earn the money doing chores).”
Velásquez also said the “best part” of her punishment is that she packed things into the bags exactly as she found them — totally randomly. She explains, “So their $25 could buy a bag of dirty clothes, it could buy a bag of trash, or it could buy their soccer gear. #MayTheOddsBeEverInYourFavor”
Since the post went up, it’s been shared more than 5,000 times, and dozens of people have left comments hailing her a genius and telling her what a great idea this is. One person even asked if the teen has earned any of her things back yet, to which Velásquez responded, “YES! She has, and her super siblings all volunteered for extra chores to help her earn faster too, SO not only was it a lesson for my oldest daughter, but a great family building exercise as well.”
We see a lot of questionable punishments and discipline tactics floating around the internet, but you really have to hand it to this mom. She didn’t yell at her daughter, shame her, or humiliate her. She gave her a reasonable consequence and taught her a valuable lesson about taking care of what belongs to her.
Raising kids is a tough gig, and figuring out how to discipline them in a way that’s also loving and fair is even harder. This mom managed to pull it off, and honestly, I’m just glad she put it online so those of us with small kids can remember to do this once they hit high school.
