It's been so difficult asking the boys to clean up their rooms. Every time it's like a battle of wills. Every time they say "not now". Every time it takes them forever to do it. Every time they don't remember to not make a big mess so they can spend less time cleaning up. So following a good friend's advice, we are now giving them each 15 minutes to clean up the toys in their rooms after quiet time, whatever is left on the floor after the timer goes off go into a bag for a week. They also need to do the same to clean up toys from the family room after dinner, or they'll lose their toys for a week.
We've implemented this for 2 days, Noah lost a few toys in the family room the first day, he was angry - which was good. That means it's working. He quickly learned the lesson and hasn't lost the toys in his room since. Ethan, however, it's taking a bit longer to learn this lesson. He still gave me the "not now" response last night. We ended up just giving him 2 minutes on the timer and took some toys away. Today when his friends wanted to play with hot wheels, he knew they were in the bag, and was disappointed he couldn't play with them. I hope that this will be a good reminder for him. Steve and I still need to more consistent keeping this up each day. Our goal is for them to learn not to make big messes to begin with, and learn to organize things in a more efficient way so clean up won't be as difficult.
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