Teen Rooms Decor.

by Marion Jones

Teen rooms are the bane of mothers everywhere. It's not even like when they were pre-teens. In those days, if their rooms were messy, you could shout at them and get them to clean it up, and, barring that, you could go in and do a good job yourself. However, when it comes to teens and their rooms you're dealing with something whole different entirely.

True, you could go and ask them to clean up their rooms. And true, you could shout at them a bit, if you wanted to, or go and clean the room yourself. However, that's when all the trouble starts. Teen rooms are private places and not to be entered into unless it's absolutely necessary.

Let Heaven help anyone who tries to tidy up the mess on the carpet. It was there for a good reason and you just had absolutely no right whatsoever to touch it. At least, that will be what most teens will argue and, you being the patient, loving mother that you are, will just roll your eyes skywards and explain that the pizza and grubby, old shirt thing just don't work well together and that you were just rescuing them from impending plague.

Your teens will in turn roll their eyes and protest loudly, not to exaggerate, it wasn't about to grow legs and walk off on its own, and if it was then wouldn't that make a great science project. So, you keep cleaning and they keep putting things back. And so ends the story, and you're right back to square one.

Of course, one way that you could deal with this catastrophe is to redecorate it. Teen rooms might be sanctums to them, but even they would love it if you gave their rooms a fantastic makeover.

That doesn't mean that the room will be any cleaner once they've moved back in, but at least you'll have seen the inside of the room long enough to satisfy you for the next few years. That is unless you're thinking of redecorating their rooms every year.

But now you come to your next problem. Since teens are famously different with regard to their rooms. You might find that your teen rooms are decorated quite differently from that which you had expected and that which you would have done first of all. This is where a  comprise should be struck, if your teen wants black walls for his room, then say you want another colour too that will offset the black.

Be prepared to compromise a lot on your ideas no matter how silly their ideas are to you. After all, they're only a teen for a while and later on they will look back with horror on what bad taste they had had.

So, it is your duty as a parent to give them these fleeting moments in their lives so that they can look back on them with mock horror and disallow their own children from doing the same to their own teen rooms.