Spring is among us and I, for one, couldn’t be any happier. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was certainly tired of being pounded with snow. One of the things, however, that many people don’t look forward to is spring cleaning. Spring cleaning can certainly be a daunting task, but it’s an important one that must be done. Plus, once everything is finished, your house is going to look better and you are going to feel better. One of the biggest problems us parents face with spring cleaning is getting our children and especially our teenagers to pitch in. However, if everyone pitches in, everything will be done much faster, so it’s important that everyone helps out. Below, I’m going to go over some tips that will help inspire your teenager to help with spring cleaning.

Set a start date and time.

It’s important that you forewarn your teenager as to when the spring cleaning activities will begin. It’s important that you let them know when spring cleaning will begin and at what time. Let them know that they will be cleaning on that date and starting at that time. If you have to, you can write the start date and time down on a piece of paper and hang it where the family will see it.

Make sure you schedule it for a day that you know your teenager has no pre-existing arrangements and tell them not to plan anything for that day, because they’ll be home cleaning. This way, they know what’s expected of them and there won’t be any excuses.

Make everyone else help out, as well.

A teen isn’t going to be ultra-excited to help do some spring cleaning when dad is sitting back in his La-Z-Boy recliner watching television and their siblings are playing hide and seek. If you make sure that everyone else is doing their fair share of spring cleaning, your teen will do a much better job and they’ll be more enthusiastic about it.

Make a detailed list of tasks.

It’s important that you make a list of everything that needs to be cleaned and make sure you make the list as detailed as possible. For instance, you don’t want to put “clean the bathroom” on the list and leave it at that. Instead, you want to list “clean the bathroom” and break it down into sub tasks, such as:

Clean the bathroom:

• Clean the toilet.
• Wipe down the sink.
• Scrub the bathtub
• Throw all towels in the dirty clothes.
• Etc…

Give them a time limit on cleaning their own bedroom.

Everyone should have to clean their own room, but it’s important that you give a teen a time limit on cleaning their room. If you don’t, they’ll spend all day long cleaning their bedroom and not helping with the rest of the house. If they don’t finish cleaning their room within the time limit, they can continue cleaning it after they’ve helped with the rest of the house.