Sloths

Master Seven’s door is adorned with home-made signs stating: “Stop”, “No coming in”, “My police station” and “Can come in:”

The latter is followed by a list of names of all his favourite people, including the cats. Although I mostly fall into this category, my name is under the “sometimes” sub-title, depending on whether he has just been sent to the naughty step.

His brother and sister don’t, of course, feature on this list and I don’t like their chances of survival should they attempt to enter.

This is because my son is a neat-freak. Everything, and I mean everything, is in its place. When he had the Smurf collection, all 30 or so were lined up on the window sill and, god forbid, should I place one back in the wrong order after I’d dusted, he would be onto it as soon as he returned from school.

Now the Smurf collection lines his brother and sister’s window sill and I’ve long given up dusting around it. You see, Master Seven goes through phases where he absolutely loves and becomes obsessed with something (Thomas the Tank Engine, Smurfs and currently Madagascar). His family will pay a small fortune to fulfill his desire to have everything that this particular product brings out, and then overnight he’s over it and the whole collection gets shunted down the hall to his siblings’ room, much to their delight.

Because there isn’t much to the Madagascar collection, his neat-as-a-pin room now looks bare while the twin’s room looks like a junior rainbow-hued version of a charity shop.

The problem with this is that, while I have one neat-freak, the twins are sloths. They don’t give a damn the state of their room and, because there’s now so much stuff, I’ve given up trying to tidy or vacuum it. Making one’s way across their floor at night to tuck them in is a hazard and I don’t know how they’ve managed to survive themselves racing out of their room in the dark each morning to come and greet me.

Still, it could be worse: at least they are both on the same page. I remember, at the age of four, sharing a room with my baby brother and getting so fed up with his continuous game of throwing toys out of the cot that I somehow managed to convince my mother I needed my own room and my older brother ended up taking my place. To this day, (although he would vehemently deny it) my little bro is still rather slothful while I like everything in its place.

Which brings me to wonder, however can a daughter of mine be so slovenly and will they both stay this way?

I asked family therapist/author/parenting coach and tv presenter Diane Levy her views:

“I think that – as with most ways of thinking about parenting – there is “Nature” and “Nurture”.

A person’s initial “Nature” is genetically determined (depending on your belief) and we, as parents, have no control over that. We get what we are given. This explains the marked difference in your children.

Melancholic perfectionists have a great desire of order and sequence and so tidiness comes naturally to them. Phlegmatic, peace-loving adults also often have a great need for tidiness and good systems. This is not so much a quest for perfection as it is a quest to avoid confrontation and lower tension and so tidiness and good systems help achieve this.

From birth, our environment also shapes us and so we can teach (read “whine, nag and insist”) our children to become tidy, but it is an uphill struggle when we have children who couldn’t care less and for whom mess is not a worry.

Another factor is the pace of life we live and the many activities we encourage our children to enjoy. Often, there is no time for the mundane task of “tidy your room” and a lack of our energy to see it through.

Amazingly, our previously messy children, who use their bedroom floors as a muddled, chaotic system of horizontal filing, may grow up to be very tidy in their own homes. I would like to think that this is the triumph of Nurture over Nature and that what they learned at home (but rarely practised) did brush off onto them…but I am more drawn to the idea that it is both a mystery and a miracle!”