How much should you tidy your child’s bedroom?

So, I have been having a bit of an internal dilemma recently about how much I should tidy my children’s bedrooms.

For context, I have an 8-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter, and although they receive pocket money each week on the standard premise that they keep their bedrooms tidy, I spend quite a bit of my time tidying it myself.

I hear many people say that ‘Whilst you live in my house you follow my rules’ and I understand that we need to teach children how to be responsible and keep things clean and tidy. But there is a huge part of me that really believes that we should be giving our children the tools to make their own decisions and I want them to learn about their own style and be responsible for their own spaces.

For example, I try as much as possible to let my children dress themselves in whatever they want, apart from uniforms of course. My son isn’t interested in clothes at all so has a fairly standard style of jeans and a T-shirt. My daughter on the other hand really has her own sense of style!! I would never put half of the outfits she puts on together! She loves mixing the brightest colours and patterns, then accessorises the outfits with huge hair clips, jewellery and shoes that are never appropriate for the weather (like heeled princess shoes in the rain and Ugg boots in the sunshine). I have accepted with style that it’s important for them to be able to express themselves and have control over what they wear, so why can’t I do it with their bedrooms?

When it comes to their rooms, my son is currently really into match attack cards (which are cards with stats about football players), he also loves Pokémon cards and top trump cards (Can you see the running theme…). He will spend hours up in his bedroom organising his cards into very specific piles, ranking them from the best-attacking footballers or the best Pokémon characters. Now what I see when I walk past his room is cards covering every single surface and to be honest, I find all that clutter pretty stressful! To my son, his bedroom is perfectly organised, he is super happy in there and he loves organising and reorganising his piles.

My daughter is really crafty, and her bedroom is covered in current projects or materials she has found around the house that she thinks she could use to create her latest masterpiece. She also dips in and out of playing with her dolls, so there are usually some makeshift beds and reading areas set up with cushions and blankets for them to sit in. Again, for me walking past her bedroom, I just see chaos! But to her, everything is exactly where she wants it.

My gut instinct is that I need to back off and allow my children to have their own spaces that they are in charge of. Instead of messing with their spaces, maybe I could focus on modelling what tidy and organised can look like with the rest of the house, I could certainly use the extra time to practice what I’m preaching!

I would love to know what you do. Is all the mess and clutter a bit too much for you? Or have you already let go and moved on with your life? Leave me a comment or get in touch via social media to let me know.

In the meantime, I’m off to close my children’s bedroom doors…