Teen rooms are the bane of mothers everywhere. It’s not even like when they were younger. Those days if their rooms were messy you could shout at them and get them to clean up, and barring that you could go in and do a good job yourself. But when it comes to teens and their rooms you’re dealing with a whole different kettle of fish.

True, you could go ask them to clean up their rooms. And true, you could shout at them a little if you wanted to, and go and clean the room yourself. However that’s when all hell breaks loose. Teen rooms are sacred places and not to be entered lightly. Woe betides the person who even dares to move one inch of that grungy mess on the carpet. It was there for a reason and you had no right to move it. At least that will the argument of most teens, and you being the patient, caring mother that you are will just roll your eyes and tell them that the whole pizza and day-old shirt thing just don’t go well together and you were just rescuing them from the wrath of the walking pizza slice.

Your teen will in turn roll their eyes and protest loudly, that no it wasn’t about to grow legs and walk off on its own, and if it was then wouldn’t that be a great science project. You keep cleaning and they keep putting things back. End of story, and you’re basically right back at square one.

One way that you could of course deal with this catastrophe though is to redecorate. Teen rooms might be sanctities of peace for them, but even they would like it if you could give their rooms a great makeover. That’s not to say that the room will be any cleaner once you’ve finished and they’ve moved back in, but at least you’ll get to see the inside of the room long enough to tide you over for the next few years. That is unless you’re thinking of redoing their rooms every year.

Now this then is where you come to your next problem. Since teens are notoriously different when it comes to their rooms, you might find that your teen rooms are decorated quite differently to what you expected and what you would have done in the first place. This is where a comprise should be struck, if your teen wants black for his room, then say you want something else that will offset the black.

Be prepared to give a little on your ideas no matter how ridiculous their ideas might seem. After all you’re only a teen once and you will look back and think with fond horror on what bad taste you had. As a parent it’s your duty to give them these moments in their lives upon which they can look back on with due horror, and ban their kids from doing the same to their own teen rooms.