Book Review: Cleaning House

One afternoon I found myself with an hour to spare in a part of town that made it inconvenient to go home before I had to pick up a kid. There happened to be a bookstore right there. And so I found myself, for one glorious hour, browsing a brick-and-mortar bookstore for no other reason than that I could. One whole hour spent just wandering shelves, looking at titles, flipping through cookbooks and pondering new releases.

Which is how I found this:

We're preparing for a cross-country move with three kids, and I thought Kay Wills Wyma's Cleaning House: A Mom's 12-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement would be a great resource for how to motivate the kids to give me the help I need to make this process go smoothly.

Wyma claims her Experiment was prompted by her 14-year-old son's off-hand request for a Porsche for his 16th birthday. She came up with a twelve-step program to teach the children the hows and whys of self-sufficiency. Each month was assigned a step (see below for a list).

Each month she announced, via a pseudo-democratic family meeting, what the project of the month was. She heard the groans, the protests, and the eyerolls, and she persevered. She gave each child his or her own container, put a dollar for each day of the month in it, and then set them to work. If they failed to do the required job they lost a dollar for that day. At the end of the month they kept whatever remained. As the year progressed, the chores that had been practiced the month before were retained, so that in the first month they were earning a dollar a day just for keeping their rooms neat, and by the end of the year they were keeping their rooms neat, doing their own laundry, helping to plan, prepare, and clean up after meals, and more, all for that same dollar. Halfway through she also instituted a jobs board that enabled kids to earn extra on additional projects.

It was generous of Wyma to give readers insight into her family. I always appreciate hearing how normal my kids are -- other people's kids give more or less the same kind of trouble in more or less the same proportions as mine.

It also was reassuring; my kids have been helping set the table, clear dishes, make beds, dust, sweep, empty the dishwasher, sort dirty laundry, fold and put away clean laundry, and help out with the grocery shopping since they were very small. Wyma's kids didn't know what produce was. So at least I knew I hadn't been slacking as much as I feared in the personal responsibility aspect of child-rearing.

But as interesting as I found Wyma's insights, the book was lacking as a parenting guide. It really is just an account of how things went for one family. Her kids never failed; the dollar and her word seemed to be sufficient motivation for them. If I promised my kids a dollar a day to clean their rooms and make their beds, I'm pretty sure they'd earn only maybe half the money (at best), because they are so unaccustomed to having a regular income. Not getting a dollar they wouldn't have gotten anyway makes little impact on them. Nobody in her family ever seemed to balk at whatever she was asking of them, or if they did she didn't talk at all about how she coped with the resistance. They complained and maybe rolled their eyes, and then they did it.

They also never seemed to fail even when they made the attempt. Failure happens, even when the kids are moved by a generous spirit, as when my six-year-old broke a glass while emptying the dishwasher. He was so excited to help and show how capable he was that he was moving fast. The look on his face when he dropped it was heartbreaking. Of course he was barefoot, so my reaction was "DON'T MOVE!" because I was afraid he would step on the glass and cut his feet. But he heard yelling and thought he was in trouble. When we got everything cleaned up he said "I guess I should just go back to putting away the silverware." Of course I reassured him and he got over it; the point is that her kids rarely failed at what they attempted, except from resistance or laziness (as when they were cleaning the bathroom), nor does she address how to draw the line between a job done poorly but with good intentions and a job just flat out done poorly.

Another difficulty I had with this book is that her conservative political bent sometimes manifests as though her kids are liberals (she actually uses the word "socialists") who expect handouts, while she, the responsible conservative, wants them to be responsible for themselves. As a liberal, I really object to her position, but since it doesn't cover the majority of her book, just kind of flavors it, it is not a reason to avoid it altogether. I do want to point out,  however, that liberals want their children to be as empowered and capable as conservatives do, and that if she does continue writing like this that I would find her work more compelling if she left the liberal-conservative thing out of it. And also, used the word "socialists" correctly.

I'm not sure if Wyma meant Cleaning House to be a parenting book or a memoir; she did almost no research to support her assertions. She mentioned Michael Gurian's Wonder of Boys a few times, but it sounded like she had heard it recounted to her, rather than read it herself. There were a few other snippets of professional advice scattered throughout, but mostly it was the anecdotal sort from other families, so helpful, but not necessarily authoritative. Surely over the course of a year she could have read his book herself (especially since he blurbed hers for her)? And perhaps one or two others on similar topics?

Overall, I'd give Cleaning House 3 1/2 stars out of 5. I take a full star off for not being specific enough about resistance and failure, and half a star for putting a conservative slant on a topic that does not need to be politicized. If you'd like a jumping off place for helping teach your children to be useful, confident adults, you could do worse than this book. I just wish that Wyma had done rather better.

*Kay Wills Wyma's Twelve Steps: 

1. Making beds and keeping clutter off the floor
2. Planning and cooking a meal, cleaning up kitchen afterwards
3. Working outdoors
4. Making income
5. Cleaning the bathrooms
6. Laundry
7. Small maintenance/repair jobs around the home
8. Hospitality
9. Working as a Team
10. Running errands
11. Service to others
12. Good manners

Enough

Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf (Virginia Woolf) with her mother, Julia Stephen, 1884

In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf describes her mother, who died when Woolf was thirteen; this memory is written forty-four years after her death, when Woolf was herself fifty-seven:

Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first.  My first memory is of her lap; the scratch of some beads on her dress comes back to me as I pressed my cheek against it.  Then I see her in her white dressing gown on the balcony; and the passion flower with the purple star on its petals.  Her voice is still faintly in my ears -- decided, quick; and in particular the little drops with which her laugh ended -- three diminshing ahs... "Ah -- ah -- ah..."  I sometimes end a laugh that way myself.  And I see her hands, like Adrian's [Woolf's brother], with the very individual square-tipped fingers, each finger with a waist to it, and the nail broadening out. (My own are the same size all the way, so that I can slip a ring over my thumb.)  She had three rings; a diamond ring, an emerald ring, and an opal ring.  My eyes used to fix themselves upon the lights in the opal as it moved across the page of the lesson book when she taught us, and I was glad that she left it to me (I gave it to Leonard [Woolf's husband]).  Also I hear the tinkle of her bracelets, made of twisted silver, given her by Mr Lowell, as she went about the house; especially as she came up at night to see if we were asleep, holding a candle shaded; this is a distinct memory, for, like all children, I lay awake sometimes and longed for her to come.  Then she told me to think of all the lovely things I could imagine.  Rainbows and bells...
...
But apart from her beauty, if the two can be separated, what was she herself like? Very quick; very direct; practical; and amusing, I say at once offhand.  She could be sharp, she disliked affectation.  "If you put your head on one side like that you shan't come to the party," I remember she said to me as we drew up in a carriage in front of some house.  Severe; with a background knowledge that made her sad.
...
But can I get any closer to her without drawing upon all those descriptions and anecdotes which after she was dead imposed themselves upon my view of her?  Very quick; very definite; very upright; and behind the active, the sad, the silent.  And of course she was central.  I suspect the word "central" gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person.... She was the whole thing; Talland House was full of her; Hyde Park Gate [the homes where Woolf's family lived during her childhood] was full of her.  I see now, though the sentence is hasty, feeble and inexpressive, why it was that it was impossible for her to leave a very private and particular impression upon a child.  She was keeping what I call in my shorthand the panoply of life -- that which we all lived in common -- in being.  I see now that she was living on such an extended surface that she had not time, nor strength, to concentrate, except for a moment if one were ill or in some child's crisis, up on me, or upon anyone -- unless it were Adrian.  Him she cherished separately; she called him 'My Joy'.  The later view, the understanding that I now have of her position must have its say; and it shows me that a woman of forty with seven children, some of them needing grown-up attention, and four still in the nursery; and an eighth, Laura, an idiot, yet living with us; and a husband fifteen years her elder, difficult, exacting, dependent on her; I see now that a woman who had to keep all this in being and under control must have been a general presence rather than a particular person to a child of seven or eight.

Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"

Moments of Being, pp. 81-83 

Julia Stephen (rear) with six of her seven children, plus a friend.
Front row: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen
photos from Dust on the Shelves

This meditation by a daughter on her soul-deep longing for her mother was beautiful and reassuring to me.  The things that Julia Stephen did for her daughters (Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, were both home schooled, with mixed results -- both women counted on their fingers to the end of their days, but could follow Cambridge and Oxford educated scholars with confidence), were less important to her than the fact of her presence.  Woolf doesn't remember the lessons so much as watching the opal ring during the lessons.  She knows she was loved, and though she may have resented all the distractions from her mother's attention, she remembers her lovingly, not resentfully.  She misses those individual attentions, but recognizes that her mother created and sustained the entire shape of her life, a life which she remembers with laughter, and nostalgia, and as a time of the greatest confidence.

In an era when mothers are bombarded with often-conflicting information about the "right" way to parent, when we're constantly told we're not doing enough or when Time magazine can demand "Are you MOM enough?" it's nice to be reminded that it's not so much each individual choice that adds up to "Mom enough" but the simple fact of our loving presence, the "natural quality that a mother -- she seemed typical, universal, yet our own in particular -- had by virtue of being our mother."