Should You Let Your 4.5 Year Old Decorate His Own Room?

Should you let your child decorate his own room if he’s four and a half years old? I don’t know. Do I let my four and a half year old son decorate his own room? Yes. Are there more pressing issues like ISIS and Ebola that we could be discussing right now? Most certainly. But that’s probably not why you’re reading a moms blog at this exact moment.

I like to think of this as his first public art installation. He described it as, "This is my science center and my office where people buy stuff." I'm not certain, but it also appears he has created an OJ Simpson Murder Trial station in the foreground.
I like to think of this as his first public art installation. He described it as, “This is my science center, and that’s my writing center, and over here is my office where people buy stuff.” And I’m not certain, but it also appears he has created an OJ Simpson Murder Trial station in the foreground.

Allow me to provide you with a mental and emotional break for the next two to forty-five minutes as you peruse my son’s decorating habits. (I don’t know how many kids you have yelling at you at any given time that they don’t like the way you displayed the food on their plates/ need you to find the safety scissors NO NOT THE GREEN ONES, ONLY THE RED ONES BECAUSE GREEN IS NOT THEIR FAVORITE COLOR TODAY; therefore, I don’t know how long it takes you to read.)

My son is basically a 90 year old spinster who just wants to rearrange her knick knacks all day long on a shelf, but she has poor balance and motor skills and just puts everything on a footstool. *Little known fact: This was actually the plot summary for Tennessee Williams' first draft of The Glass Menagerie.
My son is basically a 90 year old spinster who just wants to rearrange her knick knacks all day long on a shelf, but she has poor balance and motor skills and just puts everything on a footstool. *Little known fact: This was actually the plot summary for Tennessee Williams’ first draft of The Glass Menagerie.

I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture, but my son shares my affinity for rearranging furniture at least once a week, and his repeated attempts to cover every open space on his floors and walls with color and trinkets is reminiscent of my childhood and college dorm rooms. I couldn’t stand the sight of blank walls, and my collections of key rings, Bass loafer curly shoelaces, bumper stickers, every photo I had ever been in, plus collectible figurines, ribbons, buttons, plaques, certificates, homecoming mums, stolen restaurant menus, Christmas lights, YOU NAME IT, decorated my rooms. Did I mention I would also decoupage anything with greater than a 4 inch surface area? My rooms looked like Mi Tierra on steroids.

After a lifetime of loving to live in brightly colored chaos, it seems nearly impossible to fathom that I now get very anxious and upset when my house is in disarray. But I do. I still like a dash of chaos here and there, but my brain and my nerves crave a visually clean and orderly space. I probably work too hard on making sure every counter is free of clutter and there’s nothing laying on the floor, but many times I can’t stop, and then I get frustrated in feeling like I’m trapped in a Groundhog Day of never ending housekeeping. I bring this feeling on myself, and I’m working on it, but in all honesty, some level of nonstop housekeeping is just the trademark of a home with more than one occupant. I’m sure the anxious feelings I get from clutter have something to do with feeling out of control and like I will never know the “ahhhhh” of relaxation that comes from surveying an entirely peaceful looking, clean home for just two minutes each month.

I’m sure I have turned into my mother.

She, too, probably wanted only to wake up in her home once a month and not see loads of unfolded laundry draped over the couch, toys scattered in each room, dustballs twirling down the hall, burnt cheese dried in the oven, unsorted mail piled in three locations, hard water stains (AGAIN) coating the toilet and shower, and no less than four pairs of her husband’s shoes sprinkled around like the world’s most obnoxious potpourri.

But I hope I am turning into my mother.

Because despite how much time she spent trying to keep the public viewing spaces of the house together (kitchen, living room and bathrooms), she always let us three kids have ownership of our own bedrooms. She let us create spaces (within reason) that nurtured our hobbies and interests and made us feel happy and safe.

The time he sold workbook pages, cars, coupons, sea creature sponges and an unclothed child in a box. (If you visit any versions of his "stores", I think you get put on a government watch list.)
The time he sold workbook pages, cars, coupons, sea creature sponges and an unclothed child in a box. (If you visit any versions of his “stores”, I think you get put on a government watch list.)

As long as we made our beds, picked up our clothes and kept our rooms clean, these private spaces were our own. (That is also why she is very frustrated decades later that there are 8,000 pin holes in the walls and glow-in-the-dark stars that will have to be removed with the hammer of Thor, but those are small prices to pay for giving your children the gifts of ownership and freedom of expression, in my opinion.)

Running Man Exhibition #1: Running Man holding 2014 Brush Collection door flyer.
Running Man Exhibition #1: Running Man holding 2014 brush collection door flyer.

And while my own home may never maintain whatever arbitrary measures of cleanliness that my brain apparently craves in order for me to keep my blood pressure down, I am 100% on board with giving up control of my children’s rooms because I believe the benefits my kids will receive will far outweigh my temporary frustration with housekeeping.

Running Man Exhibition #2: Running Man holding pencil case and SPIbelt stolen from mom.
Running Man Exhibition #2: Running Man holding pencil case and SPIbelt stolen from mom.

Now, if I were a Pinterest mom, I would make a really cute chart outlining all the benefits of letting a preschooler decorate a room and it would be written in a fun font in the Pantone Color of 2014. My list would have words and phrases like motor skills, freedom, exercising creativity, establishing independence, imagination, ownership, input, personal reflection, confidence, and baby shower mustache party chevron straws. But I don’t think it’s all that serious. It all comes down to my kid getting genuinely excited about decorating his room. He loves it.

Here, he has chosen to decorate his desk with items that reflect who he is as a person. A person who occasionally glues things to the carpet and racing at the BMX track. A Jewish boy who can blow the shofar but who also enjoys hunting for Easter eggs.
Here, he has chosen to decorate his desk with items that reflect who he is as a person. A person who occasionally glues things to the carpet and enjoys racing at the BMX track. A Jewish boy who can blow the shofar and who sells old Easter eggs to his sister in exchange for chapstick.

 

"This is my art gallery where I do art shows but I don't use those paints because you told me not to but don't take them out of my room because I never use them." ~ My son
“This is my art gallery where I do art shows but I don’t use those paints because you told me not to but don’t take them out of my room because I never use them.” ~My son

And I love when he calls me in to check out his latest design work because he is a kid, and therefore a total weirdo, and I will never be able to anticipate what I am about to walk in to when I enter his room. And this is one of the best free gifts I can give him.

The time he made me my first picnic featuring underwear, balled up socks, and baseball cards.
Much like Bill Hader’s character Stefon on SNL, my son had to verbally invite me to his underwear/balled up socks/baseball card picnic because there is no Evite template for this kind of party.

His little sister is even nuttier, and I can’t imagine (and can’t wait) for what she will do to her room if she decides someday she’s interested in doing anything other than wrecking her brother’s room.

And though it will take me some time to be cool in accepting that my house may never visually calm my nerves, I can already tell the pleasure I get in seeing my kids happy in their personal spaces is helping me come around. If I didn’t have the chaos, I wouldn’t have the three other housemates that I deeply love, and I wouldn’t trade them for all the clean countertops in the world.

Ashley
Ashley is a back-up dancer for circa 1989 Janet Jackson in her dreams and a mother of two preschoolers in her waking life. An Alamo City native, she spent her college and post-college years in TN, CA and AZ (all lovely states completely incompetent in the fine art of breakfast tacos). After crying everyday in radio sales, working next to a sheep pen at a rural telecom, being totally confused in agriculture, and completely giving up and drawing cartoons of co-workers at an online university, she finally found her calling in grant writing for a non profit arts organization. And then her husband (who, no joke, watches college football for a living) was like, “Hey! We can move to San Antonio to be closer to your family if you want to!” And then Ashley was like, “Hey! That’s good timing because remember all that drinking I was doing last week because I thought I had really bad PMS and wanted to power through it? Well, that PMS is a baby!” So they moved to S.A. and Ashley found a job with a rural non profit, but when she tried to go back to work after the baby, living on no sleep with a newborn and a traveling husband unable to share in the workload, she quickly learned she was about five seconds away from a mental breakdown. Cut to today where she is a full time mom, loving the freedom to run all over the city each day with her kids, despite a 98% decrease in her ability to pee alone/do less than 19 loads of laundry each week. She chronicles her most embarrassing childhood moments and photos at This is Me at 13-ish (http://meat13.tumblr.com), in hopes that she never forgets that as difficult as it is to be a parent, it is just as much of a struggle to be a kid.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Oh my gosh, Ashley … our kids would get along like a cracked-out four-man Gabba Gang! I just wish I could confine their stores, offices, art shows, cardboard-box helicopters and pirate ships, origami, large-format Olivia character drawings, and Polly Pocket/Tic-Tac Box dioramas to their rooms — but no, that’s just what I’m looking at IN MY LIVING ROOM. I’ll try to appreciate it all the way you seem to — because I’ve given up on trying to hold back the tide. 🙂

    • I figure if they’re putting so much work into their deliberate displays and then asking me to see them and PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH MY STUFF WHILE I’M AT SCHOOL AND PLEASE LEAVE IT LIKE THIS FOR ME BECAUSE I MADE IT THIS WAY then I should just appreciate all their hard work. Those Tic Tac boxes have been filled with broken crayon tips and placed next to a stopwatch draped over a stuffed monkey just so and I need to clearly respect their art, I guess! My son rearranges his furniture about twice a week to suit some sort of “office” he is now working in or “job” he has and he spends hours on these purposeful displays of randomness and I’m learning to just take pictures of it all and look forward to it rather than try to clean it up. I mean, POTUS will never visit my house with his photographer so why am I even bothering to clean (is my general excuse for letting the house go)!

  2. Great article. I especially love the running man; and when you say “. . . I will never know the “ahhhhh” of relaxation that comes from surveying an entirely peaceful looking, clean home for just two minutes each month.” You are so right— it is an “ahhhh” moment, and it only lasts about two minutes—- before the clutter begins again.

    Last year my now fourteen year old granddaughter wrote in an essay: “When I was around five or six Meemaw let me paint my aunt’s old room anyway I wanted, and she didn’t mean one solid color. For the next few weeks I painted my aunt’s old room with bright colors and birds and she helped me. All of that definitely explains where I get my creativity.” I cried when I read this.

    By the way, I strongly recommend that all of you young mothers invite your mothers (and others who love your children like a grandmother) to subscribe to the Alamo City Moms Blog. We old gals need to stay up with modern trends in parenting, and all the great things San Antonio has to offer our children.

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