If your tween doesn't pick up his room when told to, or if the chaos quickly takes over after you do it for him, the best approach is to start from scratch and help him find a way to organize his space that works for him. Set aside at least half a day to help him with this project.

Walk him through the steps and give advice, but insist that he make all the decisions. If your tween is accustomed to deferring to you, he needs to realize that you are now turning responsibility for keeping his room clean and in order over to him. He needs to decide where things go so he can find them and put them away without help.

Teaching Tweens to Categorize

The first step to organizing anything is identifying the main categories. For a bedroom, the main categories of items that need to be organized are clothes, toys, books, and papers. Next, your child must establish the subcategories. Those are the groups of similar objects that should be stored together so they are easier to find and put away.

Subcategories for clothing might include underwear, school clothes, play clothes, shoes, pajamas, and so on. Socks might be a separate subcategory from underwear if your child prefers to store them in separate drawers, or they could be in the same subcategory if he wants them stored together. Possible subcategories for toys are large toys, small toys, and special collections.

Have your tween make the decisions about where to store items belonging to each subcategory by taking into account both the size of the storage area and its location. It's usually better to store frequently used objects in easily accessible locations. Pose the questions he needs to learn to ask when organizing objects:

• Is it better to store school clothes near the front of a closet and the dress clothes he rarely wears in the back?

• Is the drawer he has selected big enough to hold all of his T-shirts and jeans? If not, is it better to select a bigger drawer, or put shirts in one drawer and jeans in another?

• Would it be easier for him to have T-shirts folded in a drawer or hung in a closet?

• Would his models look better on top of his bureau or hung on the wall?

• Would it be easier to keep pencils on top of his desk so he doesn't have to dig through his desk drawer?

While teaching your child to organize, remind him that the point of organizing is to make things easier to find. Accordingly, encourage him to improve on whatever system you devise. All that matters is what works best for him.

Maintaining Organization

Tweens' bedrooms quickly fall into disarray unless they have a trashcan and a place to put dirty clothes. Unless your child is responsible about carrying dirty clothes to the laundry immediately, consider putting a basket under her bed and notify her before you do laundry so she can get them to be washed.

Pack rats need a drawer for miscellaneous papers, too. A serious pack rat might require several boxes for miscellaneous papers and other small items. Sometimes they can be stored under the bed.

Once your tween's room is organized, the next step is to teach her to keep it from falling into disarray. The secret to staying organized is not to let the clutter build to the point that it becomes overwhelming. The easiest way is to put away each item as soon as she is finished with it.

A good time to teach her to straighten her room is before bedtime each evening. Pick up an item and ask her where it goes to help her consider what factors to take into account when straightening a room. Provide suggestions, but follow up in such a way that it's clear that it's her decision. The goal is not to serve as her slave, so be sure she's actively participating in the cleanup. An alternative is to sit on her bed and talk her through the steps, but let her do all of the physical work herself.