I Never Thought of My Kid’s Messy Room This Way, and Now I’m Crying
From the moment your toddler starts to experiment with gravity, to the months when your tween collects stacks of old schoolwork, to the years when your teen forgets that closets and drawers exist, you will likely tell them over and over again to clean their room. Did it ever occur to you to be nostalgic about their messes?
Instagram user Xenia Koval (@xeniakoval) just made me (and the more than 14,000 others who liked her recent post) rethink the piles of toys and detritus on my kid’s bedroom floor.
“I regularly take photos of the mess in my kids’ rooms,” she wrote in her recent Instagram post. “I’m always asking my kids to tidy their rooms. But I think that’s also what stops us from seeing what those rooms really are. Ten or 20 years from now, these photos will show them something they can’t get back.”
Well, darn. That reframes things, doesn’t it? Even as I’m tempted to scream (or hide) every time my 13-year-old son covers his floors in markers and scraps of paper as he makes a new work of art, I could also be documenting how wildly creative he is. Now I’m wishing I had taken snapshots of the stuffed animals, My Little Pony figures, and toy trains that used to be there when he was 4. Every LEGO brick I stepped on represented hours he spent building a world, and now I can’t recall exactly what those looked like.
“Would you love to peek into your childhood bedroom?” Koval continues in her post. “It was the story of who you were. The teddy that kept you company when you were sad. The presents Santa brought you. The outfit you thought you looked your best in. The bedtime stories your parents read to you. The books you secretly finished under the covers with a flashlight.”
This idea reminds me of the “you never know the last time you’ll pick up your kid” concept that always has me blubbering.
There’s a counterpoint to this advice, which is that a photo of a messy room could also be a source of shame for a child and their parent. I would definitely get my teen’s permission before taking a photo, and I wouldn’t display it or show it to anyone but him. Instead, I would save the photos in an album on my phone and add to it from time to time. In a few years, my son and I will be able to look back at all his phases via his toys, clothing, books, and furniture. Eventually he’ll appreciate that look-back, too. (As long as I don’t use it to say, “Do you remember how much I had to clean up after you?!”)
And Koval isn’t suggesting you just leave the mess there. You can, in fact, still encourage your kid to clean up right after you take a moment to snap the photo and acknowledge this: “Their mess is part of how they explore the world and who they’re becoming,” she writes. Make cleanup as easy as possible, with open bins, shelves, and light drawers. Difficult-to-open cabinets and trunks are where toys go to be forgotten forever — except maybe in those photographs you took for posterity.