Part 3 in a series on things I’ve gotten more relaxed about over time. All of these areas are ones where people need opposite advice: some people could benefit from relaxing their standards, and others from upping their game. If you’re already pretty relaxed, maybe you should disregard all this.
Previously:
Tool: “Is this causing a problem?”
Children’s appearance is over-controlled
Some underlying beliefs
- people (especially women) often do more housework motivated by guilt anxiety than is good for their quality of life
- parents often have needless conflict with children about housework
- children will probably eventually learn to do a lot of stuff, even if they don’t do it at age 10
Choose parts of the internet you endorse
The internet will lead you to places where people (mostly women) shame themselves and each other about unstylish or untidy houses. These parts of the internet are not your friend; they are not here to help you have a good life.
Some places I do like:
Glennon Doyle, Give me gratitude or give me debt
“Maybe the 80’s counters, laminate cabinets, mismatched appliances and clutter really were mistakes I should try to fix. I stood and stared and suddenly my kitchen looked shabby and lazy to me. I wondered if that meant I was shabby and lazy, too. . . .
Inside my refrigerator is FOOD. Healthy food that so many parents would give anything to be able to feed their children. Not me. When this food runs out, I’ll just jump in my car to get more. It’s ludicrous, really. It’s like my family hits the lottery every freaking morning.”
Laura Vanderkam, Spend less time cleaning (without spending a dime)
“Another thing to stop doing: tidying up at night so the house will pass some sort of inspection. . . Do I think people will judge me? Who? Who will judge you? If you’re picking up because you really, really love a clean house and consider that a high priority in your life, than by all means do it. If it’s for some imagined other, maybe it’s not a good use of time.”
I haven’t read How to Keep House While Drowning, but I’ve heard good things about it for people who want to feel less stressed about housework. I think it’s largely about detaching “my house is dirty” from “I’m a bad person.”
Cleaning house like a man
It used to be that if a man claimed that a lot of housework was unnecessary, I bristled. I felt he didn’t properly understand that women would be judged for not ironing clothes or whatever, and can’t just turn off anxiety about it. Now I think: do I want to be part of maintaining that standard, either for myself or for other women?
Single women spend a lot more time on housework than single men (13 hours vs 9 hours). Maybe there are some good reasons for that — like that women are doing housework for their boyfriends, or women are eating healthier home-cooked food while men are eating out. But I suspect a lot of it is that women have higher standards.
People vary in how much they actually enjoy a clean / tidy house. As one friend put it, “If something is out of place, my brain will inform me.” The way to quiet their brain is to put the thing back in its place. If this is you, or you enjoy tidying and cleaning compared to other things you’d otherwise, that’s a good use of time.
But the amount of gender skew here makes me suspect the drive to tidy/clean is largely social rather than an immutable part of one’s nature. I hope my children will learn to do enough housework to be happy and healthy, but not enough to satisfy imaginary critics.
To be fair, most of the times when we’ve tracked our time, Jeff spends more time on housework and childcare than I do! But he’s focusing on things like getting the kids a nutritious breakfast, not on cleaning the bathroom floor.
Engage in scruffy hospitality
I grew up in a house where my parents rarely had friends over, partly because they felt the house wasn’t tidy enough. I’m glad Jeff and I don’t have that level of discomfort about the state of our house. We do clear out two rooms for a large gathering about once a month, and we have a pretty well-oiled system for this now.
Recently I went to an outdoor birthday party that got rained indoors. The house was not tidy (understandably given that the hosts have two young children) and that was fine. It felt nice to see a model of hosting that doesn’t depend on getting your house in order first.
Things I’ve changed
(Why are these things my area rather than Jeff’s? Originally I had much stronger preferences about laundry, so laundry is over-represented here.)
- No longer sorting laundry loads by color. If you use cold water, the colors don’t run significantly (other than new dark items)
- Not folding a lot of laundry. The kids’ clothes just go into their drawers unfolded; within 24 hours they will rifle through there and everything will be in disorder anyway.
- Buying more of the clothing that you run out of first, so you don’t have to do laundry as often because you need underwear
- Everyone has their own kind of sock, so I can figure out whose are whose and I don’t match pairs of socks. Jeff has big black ones, I have smaller black ones, one kid has blue ones currently, another has black ones, another has white ones. Every few years as they change sock size they can pick a new kind. The kids do have additional socks with pictures or whatever, but I don’t try to keep track of them.
- My kids often have half-finished drawings or projects that get abandoned around the house. They each have a project bin in the common area, where their half-finished thing can live when it needs to move off the dinner table. Periodically the project bin gets sorted through. This also helps a lot with keeping beads and such away from babies.
Aiming for functional rather than photogenic children’s rooms
- Previously: On scruffy spaces
- I think many parents fight with their kids too much about room-tidying. It’s not my room; it’s not really my business how it looks.
- Lots of guides on decluttering omit what to do when your child does not want to downsize their belongings; I suspect it often involves the mom secretly throwing out a lot of the children’s belongings. I’ve had some success with the kids selling old toys at a yard sale (which they find more appealing than just having to get rid of stuff with no apparent upside).
- I sometimes think my kids’ rooms would be more useable for them if they were tidier, but they don’t want to put in the work to clear out a larger play space. If that’s their decision, I usually decide not to overrule them.
- I do require some amount of clearing paths for safety (no stuff on the ladder to your loft bed; adults must be able to walk to your window to open and shut it.)
- I do want my kids to have the skills for when they want or need to tidy a space. To some extent they practice this in our common spaces, though probably not as much as ideal. I periodically insist on 15 minutes of us cleaning their rooms together, and I help them figure out homes for different kinds of belongings.
- If children are sharing a room, there’s more need for negotiation.