The Messy Room DilemmaWhen to ignore behavior, when to change it.
Posted Friday, March 27, 2009, at 12:18 PM ET
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StumbleUponWhen you ask yourself, Why focus on it?, you may decide that it's not worth addressing the problem. Or asking Why focus on it? may help you to narrow down the problem to those elements that really do need to be addressed. Some aspects of a sloppy room may really be nonnegotiable: candles and incense near flammable material or rotting food or some other potential biohazard. If the mess is dangerous, if there are consequences for other people in the household, then it's certainly worth addressing. And, guided by your own answer to Why focus on it?, be prepared to trade an inessential for an essential. Let her keep her clothes on the floor if she does her own laundry and cleans up food mess as soon as she makes it.
Parents frequently respond to Why focus on it? by expressing a worry that if they let their child be sloppy in her room she will be sloppy everywhere: in her personal appearance, in her schoolwork, in her career. They have fantasies about her getting fired in middle age for having a messy office. But when it comes to messiness, the slippery-slope argument is a fallacy. Having a messy room is an identifiable stage that tends to appear in adolescence and then go away. After the messy interlude of the preteen and teen years, most people return to or rise to some basic standard of neatness—a standard very likely resembling the one you have modeled in your own housekeeping.
So if your adolescent child keeps herself reasonably clean and presentable, and if the problem's not so severe that it's causing other problems, consider letting slide the messiness of her room as a stage she's going through. Yes, every parent will always have a story of an adult who's a genuine slob to back up the claim that not everybody recovers from adolescent messiness, but those cases are exceptions. Really, how many adults do you know who have rooms like your kid's? Not many. They grew out of it. So why move heaven and earth—and increase the amount of conflict in the house, and use up energy and goodwill perhaps better reserved for more significant matters—to correct a problem that will almost certainly self-correct?
Of course, parents can have their own real reasons to object to even a little messiness in a child's room. It could be that you're a very tidy person, and you just can't abide it. That's a legitimate complaint, but recognize that it's not about any abnormal behavior on the part of your child. Be straight about it with her. Tell her that you can't live with such a mess in the house, and that, together, you're going to have to compromise on some middle ground between your standard (no mess ever, anywhere) and hers (let the clothes fall where they may). As you work out the compromise, consider that, especially if the rest of your house is neat, your child's messy room is an expression of autonomy and independence, normal for her stage of development. And try to remember that clutter, however much it offends you, may not belong in the same category of urgency as things that can lead to permanent consequences—like those candles right under the curtains.
What if you just ignore an unwanted behavior but don't reinforce its positive opposite? Extinction—eliminating an unwanted behavior just by ignoring it—does have the virtue of not reinforcing the unwanted behavior by attending to it, but it's not a very effective way to change behavior. The research shows that extinction on its own is likely to fail. And even if extinction works in the long run, the unwanted behavior you're ignoring often gets worse before it starts its slow decline, so you'll need to be disciplined and patient.
When the unwanted behavior does get worse before it begins to go away—a recognized effect called "extinction burst"—parents often become prematurely convinced that ignoring has failed and switch over to attending to the behavior again, explaining why it's bad, punishing it, yelling, and so on. This attention to the extinction burst unwittingly makes the behavior worse in two ways. First, the parent attended to a more extreme example of the behavior than usual—so, for instance, if you're trying to eliminate tantrums, you've now reinforced tantrums that register on the Richter scale. Second, the parent attended to the behavior after a period of ignoring it, which is called intermittent reinforcement and helps to maintain it. Yes, you can get back on track, but you have now made your task more difficult, and ignoring is more likely than ever to fail.
Let's say you have exercised yogic self-discipline and have successfully ignored an annoying behavior to the point that it begins to go away. As you continue to ignore the behavior and it declines (very slowly), one final nasty surprise lies in wait: Just when you think success is assured, the behavior may return out of the blue, almost as bad as ever. This temporary return, a predictable late spike, makes most parents who get this far decide that they have failed and go back to attending to the behavior, returning them to square one. But the final spontaneous return of the behavior, a last gasp before it disappears for good, would be short-lived if you could tie yourself to the mast and ignore it. In some especially frustrating cases, a forewarned parent does find the strength to ignore even this last onslaught, only to be undermined by a grandparent, spouse, or someone else in the house who feeds the futility by declaring defeat and jumping in to attend to the behavior.
That leaves a further question we'll take up in a subsequent article: When do you get serious about actively dealing with a child's misbehavior? Getting serious usually means first taking steps on your own, but sometimes it means seeking professional help. Even if you're inclined to let a behavior drop out on its own, and even if it's likely to, you're not always in a position to wait for nature to take its course. Yes, sure, if your 4-year-old tries to steal a candy bar from a store under your nose, you might just make him put it back, and you see it as a phase he'll grow out of. But what if your 11-year-old steals a candy bar when he's in a store without you, and the cashier grabs him and calls the police, and your enterprising heir takes a poke at the cop and makes a break for it? It may still be a phase, a statistically predictable dalliance with stealing that's likely to end on its own, but you're going to feel a much more urgent need to do something about it. And you may even decide that you need the help of an expert. In a follow-up article, we'll offer some guidelines for making such decisions.
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