Teenage Boys Are Gross

I am the young looking mother of two teenage boys.  Boys are different from normal folks, boys are just plain gross.  Have you ever seen the movie "Animal House" and how filthy the Delta House is?  That is what my boys bedrooms and their computer room looks like but without the beer and whiskey bottles.

Grunge in Computer room

My 19 year old son BPB (Bipolar Boy) has piles upon piles on his floor, in his closet, in his still unpacked boxes and even on some of his shelves.  He keeps dirty auto parts on his window sill.  He washes them in his bathroom sink, or did until I put a stop to that!  The kid is a snorting pig.  I think he smells his clothes to see if he can wear them without washing them.  I shudder to think of the state of his bed linens.

BPB's room

My 17 year old son BBB (Baseball Boy) is also a piggy.  He has a bigger room so there aren't piles on top of piles, one just cannot see the carpet for the clothes. (My room used to look like this.  In fact, the first time my future husband saw my bedroom floor it was covered in my clothes.)  BBB prefers his clothes to be clean and a miracle has happened!  He has learned to do his own laundry.  He doesn't complain, he just gets it done when he needs to clean his clothes.  Praise God, it really is a miracle.

BPB's room

Their computer room is what peeves the male parent in the household.  BBB and BPB tend to bring food upstairs, they sneak it up.  Amazing how quiet a 5'11" boy can be when it suits him.  They leave pop cans and gatorade bottles and half-eaten food all over.  It IS pretty disgusting and drove their father nutso.  New rule texted to both boys tonight: The Computer room  must be cleaned daily or cable modem will vanish into the vast unknown place.  No JOKE Dudes!  Starting Date:  5/20/08.

BBB at his computer, see a tiny part of him, he refused to let me photograph his bedroom.

I can't wait to see what happens next.  I am more the audience in this drama though I will remind them of deadlines.  Do your teenagers keep their rooms clean?

Comments

[Kim]

I have two teen-age girls and for a moment I thought you had snuck into their rooms and taken a picture! They are slobs too. I hope your deadline leads to a clean room!!

[Debbie]

I thought the same thing, even though my daughter is in college, when she comes home (after I have cleaned the room!) it's a mess - clothes on the floor, cups and dishes everywhere! Otherwise, she's an okay kid.

[suburbancorrespondent]

It forever amazes me how my daughter, a creature who can be grossed out by the least little thing (a sneeze, a hiccup, my breathing), can be such a slob in her room. I'm mean, though - she can't leave the house until I can see the floor and the used Kleenex are deposited in the trash can. I know, I know, terribly cruel of me...

[adopt4him]

We hve 9 kids in the house. Their bedrooms are a wreck. No food though. It isn't allowed anywhere other than the kitchen. Each Saturday it must be "mom satisfied" clean, much different than "kid satisfied" clean. By Sunday evening you can't tell they did anything but at least at dinner time on Saturday I can walk around and look into their rooms with some sence of peace. The rest of the week I just walk by and shut the door.

[Molly]

Do your teenagers keep their rooms clean?

Bwahahahahaha! I just broke down and cleaned (picked up, really, I didn't even try to actually clean)younger daughter's room. Five large cardboard boxes of recyclable paper (most of which was college recruitment brochures, thank you US News and World Report for making the ratio of applicants to acceptances a mark of how good a school is!), several garbage bags of trash, and 20 loads of laundry later (I am not making that up. We have a small European washing machine but still. . .). The sheets required two trips through the wash with 160 degree water and a cup of bleach.

[Nancy]

Looks like my son's room except he also has a full drum set in his room. When he's not using the drums they are very handy for stacking clean clothes, dirty clothes,old school work, etc. on. Then when he wants to use the drums all the items stacked on them get thown to the floor! I also use threats to get the room cleaned - no internet access until it passes my approval. It usually takes him about a week to get it thoroughly trashed again. When I get really angry I think back to my teenage years and what my room looked like - yuck! That tends to cool me off a little.

[Insane Mama]

My boy is disgusting, He sleeps on the couch because he has outgrown his bed, and just yesterday I found approx. 23 popsicle stcks IN the couch. Pig!

[Penelope]

My daughter (12) is the original pack rat and as she has the smallest room in the house, I can rarely see the floor/bed/shelves. My son (14) is definitely NOT a normal boy-teen. He is a tad OCD and this really works in my favour, he HATES his room to be messy! I'm not complaining ;o)

[KathyR]

My 15-year-old son's room and the computer loft area are horrifying. And half of the stuff, I'm sure, is just trash. If he would just collect and thrown away the trash, the rooms would look a million times better.

But I'll be damned if I'll do it.

And "ditto" on that bed linen thing. Eeeeew.

[JaniceNW]

Quickly as I have a class in 45 minutes and I'm still at home.

Eek. Wow. I'm happy to know I am not the only one raising little piglets. 20 loads of laundry? A round of applause for Molly!

I tried banning food upstairs but they laughed and snuck it up behind my back anyway.

I refuse to stress over my lack of authority and their lack of attention to anything that doesn't directly pertain to what *they* want. Otherwise my head would explode and who would clean up that mess? Back after algebra. :)

[Daisy]

My daughter is much neater and cleaner in her apartment than she was at home. I think two years of surviving in a small dorm room convinced her to clean. My son? Well, he's blind, so he has to keep the floor picked up or he'll trip. Fear not, people, it can get better.

[Florinda]

The clothes all over the floor brought back memories - not good ones. Like your BBB, my son did learn to do his own laundry, but he never put anything away. I don't think some of his clothes saw the inside of the dresser for three years. He's been away at college in the interim and now he's living on his own, but when he comes back to visit, I swear everything creeps out of his suitcase and sprawls on the floor.

But it's not just boys. My 13-year-old stepdaughter looks like she may be even worse, given a little more time. My 8-year-old stepson is a total neat freak, though. I wonder when he'll outgrow it...

[margalit]

Wahaha. My kids can beat your kids for messiness with one hand tied behind their backs.

I think this calls for a contest, don't you?

[Jerri Ann]

I don't have teenagers yet. Mine are 3 and 5 and already they are disgusting. But, what I was writing to tell you is that when I was a teenager, I had a theory, the clean clothes went as far inside the room as you can get them, on the floor. The dirty clothes, well it didn't matter, they could go anywhere because obviously, if they are already dirty, it won't hurt to walk on them...but the clean ones, they might have been in the floor, but I wasn't going to walk on them.

At 13 I moved in with my father. Just the two of us. He was very ocd (the point that when he died, I was 19 and he had 14 years of returned bank statements and checks, in the boxes, in numerical order...yea OCD). Anyway, he assigned me the laundry so I did mine and his. Yea, he was brave. And, if I did not do it correctly, which meant taking the warm clothes from the dryer and hand pressing them, he simply made me wash them over. My own clothes he didn't care, just his.

He would clothes my bedroom door with nary a shake of the head. When he died, it was as if his OCD crept under my skin. I was a neat freak. Everything had to be in order, clean, hung up, in the dresser...the whole bit. I am still much like that only I can't do it for all four of us and run a business so I just have to do the best I can (which if you visit my site you will see that I won an online contest not long ago for dirtiest house) and try not to let it get me to til the hired help can come back.

Speaking of the hired help, my own cousin cleaned for me. She quit. She said my house was too messy for her to deal with every week. My own flesh and blood, ditched me. Yea, I might have those OCD tendencies but life just keeps getting in my way.

[Jerri Ann]

Momecentric is my new site, I'll put a link to the nasty house so you can go to the old site and see the photos and ...I didn't proof that last post and so you can see that definitely, with therapy, I'm overcoming my OCD..and lots of medication, lol.

[Emma kw]

This is what you do.... turn to BBC America ( or find a friend who pays for the extra channels!) and sit the kids down to watch "How Clean is Your House" One hour of Aggie and Kim explaining in their luverly British accents how the bugs in your mattress defacate, how the interesting growths on the plate that sits under your desk are actually some very nasty sounding bacteria, and how mice are actually incontinent ( oh yes, they pee all day long!!) , and don't even get me started on what goes on in bathrooms - Freddy Kreuger is a pussycat in comparison!! That will get the kids into their room with a trash bag, heavy duty rubber gloves and a gallon of chlorox or my name's not Mary Poppins! OK it's not, but it sounds good! But seriously - watch this program and you will understand that housekeeping is important, especially with so many bugs becoming resistant to antibiotics, and so many people suffering from allergies!

[Lisa]

Thank you, Thank you, and again I say Thank you! I was beginning to think I had actually lost my mind. I have one child a 14 1/2 year old son and his room is absolutely horrible. I broke down and cried this morning because I simply can't take it anymore. But, now that I know others are going thru the same thing I really feel much better! Thanks for the photos it help a lot! It looks identical to my son's room!