Hoarding, Stealing, and a HOT Mess
Sun, 09/13/2009 - 09:52
I spent a good portion of yesterday cleaning up my kid's room. It had gotten to a point where it was pretty much intolerable. The junk basically went up to your knees. Clothes, CDs, toys, pillows, wrappers, drink boxes, and old discarded food.
Turns out that she has been sneaking out in the middle of the night and taking everything from candy to cake mix. I found sunflower seeds and M&Ms. I found collectable Pez containers out of the packages making them less collectable. Worst of all I found bugs. All this was stuffed behind her bed.
The room is tidied now, but I really don't know what to do about the stealing, hoarding, and unwillingness to keep her room tidy. I don't mind a little bit of clutter, but when you are afraid to enter a room for fear of twisting an ankle, that's a problem.
What have others done to try and deal with a) Stealing and Hoarding b) A total hot mess of a room that just gets worse every day?
Comments
There is a good article on EmpoweringParents.com on this subject:
http://www.empoweringparents.com/Shoplifting-Stealing-and-Stealing-with-...
In the comments section is a comment on Adopted and Neglected children. The message really is: "Don't Give Up".
So, our kid's room is fairly tidy and it has been for a couple of weeks now. A big part of the process was cleaning up, throwing out, and giving away quite a lot of junk. Quite a bit was broken or damaged because of the state of the room as a whole. By reducing what can clutter, things are more managable now.
However, turns out, when my wife was stripping her bed to wash her sheets - lots of junk food hoarded behind the headboard. Not as much as last time, but still quite a bit. It included chewed gum - amongst other things.
This has turned into a situation where she doesn't eat her lunch or supper and we're confused by why she doesn't eat.
So...what have others done about this kind of thing? Do you put locks on the cabinets? How do you stop the stealing? When I tell her she needs to stop, she often says something like, "I can't, it is my life."
HELP!