Straight Talk For Teens By Teens

How clean should a teen’s bedroom be?

Dear Straight Talk: My son is 18 and he keeps his room fairly clean, but my daughter’s room is a disaster. She is 16 and I withhold her allowance unless she cleans, but 75 percent of the time she goes without. She doesn’t seem to care. How clean should a teen’s room be? — Vacaville Mom

Dear Mom: You may want to lie down with an ice pack and an eye pillow. The teen panel is roaring from that disaster area down the hall.

Number one piece of advice when dealing with teenagers: Choose your challenges carefully. With any challenge, you have three basic options: win the challenge, change the challenge, or drop the challenge. If you want to win this particular challenge, you will obviously need to do more than withhold your daughter’s allowance. But ask yourself if a clean bedroom is worth war, because I get the feeling that’s where this is headed.

Personally, I have little interest in the clean bedroom challenge. Greater dividends come from spending energy creating an emotionally safe and openly communicative home. Nothing buffers teens from stress more than a welcoming home and a place inside it that they can call their own. Of course, filth has its limits. Dirty dishes, rotting food, stinky laundry, shoe fungus, and mold are banned without debate. Combined with an occasional shoveling, that, to me, is the extent of how clean a teen’s room should be.

From Kendal, 19: This is a fight you’re never going to win. My parents berated, begged, bribed, threw away my things, threatened, withheld, and grounded. But my room remained a disaster for my entire stint at home. We engaged in a completely unnecessary and constantly inflamed battle that lasted right up to the day I moved out.

I’m now in college. My clothes are hung up and my laundry is in my hamper. Now that I have my own place, a dirty room stresses me out.

Make a deal that you’ll stop hassling her about her room if she’ll clean it when you have serious company, like at holidays. And please, if the heat won’t reach her room, don’t just close her door. Everyday in winter I came home to a freezing room.

From Jennifer, 13: Homework is kicking my butt and I’m going through a lot emotionally, so my room is a disaster, too. You never know what your daughter is dealing with, she could be under pressure to use drugs, she may have flunked a test, maybe her boyfriend is pressuring her for sex. Cleaning your room shouldn’t be that important. Yes, if you’re not doing laundry and everything stinks, that’s one thing, but what’s wrong with clutter and clothes all over the place?

From Mariah, 15: When my parents tell my sisters and me to clean our rooms, we are grounded until it’s done. Personally, I don’t care if my room is clean unless someone comes over. It’s not like my parents live in it. I don’t see why they care.

From Mary, 17: My room is fairly organized, but my 18-year-old brother’s is wall-to-wall junk. It has nothing to do with age, it’s all about personality.

From Justine, 15: You withhold allowance and that’s it? If I don’t clean my room my parents pile on the punishments until I do. The main thing they threaten is to take away the internet. Maybe you could bribe your daughter with that.

From Laura, 21: I’ve never understood why a clean bedroom is such a big deal to parents. In high school I had so much homework that free time was precious. Cleaning my room was at the bottom of my list — and I like cleaning! Had my mom punished me, it still wouldn’t have been a priority. Frankly, any parent who considers this one of their chief concerns should thank their teenager repeatedly for not having worse problems.

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Joe Camel no longer Joe Cool

Dear Straight Talk: My girlfriend smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. We’re both 17. She has been smoking since she was 14. She really wants to quit but every time she goes a couple of days without a cigarette, something comes up. Maybe it’s an exam, or three papers are due at once, or her parents are flipping out. Something always happens to stress her out, which causes her to start up again. Has anyone on the teen panel been through this? I want to support her and not nag. What do I do? — C.H., Sacramento

From Kenny, 19: Stress is definitely my number-one trigger, too, also in the form of homework. For me, it helps that my friends hack and gag when I light up. It reminds me how bad it is. My girlfriend uses supportive tactics: if she notices I’m getting jittery for a cigarette, she’ll say, “sit still for awhile, you’ll be okay.” She successfully quit smoking so that gives her credentials, but maybe you could try it with your girlfriend, too.

From Sawyer, 16: I played with cigarettes for six months and never felt addicted until recently. I hate it. Tell your girlfriend to go for a run every time she gets the urge to smoke. That’s what I do. It makes the feeling go away. If it comes back, I run till my lungs burn; then they don’t want the smoke.

From Mary 17: Your friend needs to find other ways to deal with her stress. She is just finding excuses to smoke.

From Farren, 19: It’s really hard to quit cold turkey, even with amazing willpower. Maybe she could taper off with the nicotine patch while, at the same time, replacing the negative habit with a positive, healthy habit. For instance, every time she wants a cigarette, she does a few exercises to increase her adrenaline, which will also boost her endorphins.

From Mariah, 15: Take her to see someone who is suffering from a disease caused by smoking.

From Hannah, 16: I have friends who take fun comfort in this nasty, devastating habit and it truly breaks my heart. I know it seems like a waste of time saying how much you dislike it over and over, but that’s being there for her.

Dear C.H.: The teen panel has some excellent ideas for you. I was amazed to hear that young smokers are grateful for pressure from their friends — and that friends aren’t giving up on friends who smoke. According to studies, this “positive” peer pressure is the biggest reason teen smoking is down 30 percent from 10 years ago. You might ask your girlfriend what type of pressure she would like from you, if any. If she wants it, make sure it has an “I care” tone or it will backfire. And by all means, be sensitive to her moods.

In all reality, however, your girlfriend will need more help than this to quit. For a seasoned smoking veteran, which she is, the most successful quit rate comes from hypnotherapy. In a light hypnotic trance, the smoker chooses to replace her smoking habit with a habit or habits that are healthy and desirable for her, while incurring no withdrawal symptoms.

University of Iowa researchers studied 72,000 smokers who tried to quit and found hypnosis to be the most effective method with a 30 percent quit rate (modern hypnotic techniques are much higher at around 60 percent). Nicotine replacement products like gum and patches ran at about 10 percent. The least successful method was advice from a doctor, which appeared to convince almost nobody. Sheer willpower was not much better at around 6 percent.

With cigarettes at $5 a pack, in two months, your girlfriend could pay for her hypnotherapy to quit. After that, the extra money will be hers to enjoy.

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