Why Every Parent Should Visit Their Teen’s Room

I have two “children.” One is fifteen, and one is twenty. My bedroom is downstairs, and both of theirs are on the upper level. And being that the only other room upstairs is a bathroom they share, they have their own little version of a two-person “tiny house.”

For me, this layout basically means that I have “strangers” living in my own home. Because if you have teens, you know that “room hibernation” is real.

But I do manage to make trips to visit the “neighbors,” such as when I take the clothes they’re too lazy to come get up to their rooms.

I try to make these trips upstairs as fast as possible because their upper-level abode looks like a version of Hoarders. Their trashcans are overflowing, and so are their laundry baskets.

And I feel my blood pressure rising each time I go up the stairs because I know the destruction scene I’m willfully walking into.

When I step into my son’s room — that where’s the “fun” really kicks in. Water bottles strewn across the floor. Sweaty gym clothes haphazardly littering the bed. Open college textbooks with wet, watery pages that are probably more hydrated than I am.

My daughter’s room is much different. She keeps it tidy, even with her pet rabbit’s cage in the corner of the room. The only sign of neglect is an overflowing trashcan, which I ignore because her room looks like a New York penthouse compared to her older brother’s trash dump.

But today, when I went to bring her laundry up, something magical happened.

She was sleeping, and I tried to keep quiet because I didn’t want to wake her.

After a transition to in-class learning after almost two years of virtual education, I know she’s exhausted. She’s at a new school, and that doesn’t help things. I also know the teenage drama, the desperate desire for acceptance, and the hidden hope some young man will look her way make her life stressful.

I hang her clothes up, and then, out of breath and tired, I sit down on her bed to rest for a moment.

I look around, taking in each aspect of her room. I see a bookshelf filled with books, which creates a surge of happiness in me because she finds the same solace in reading that I do.

I see a five-drawer makeup station with a bevy of perfumes sitting on top.

I see a Nirvana poster. And a lightsaber. And I realize just what an enigma my adolescent daughter is. She’s a puzzle that, after fifteen years, I still haven’t figured out.

But sitting there in silence while she sleeps is a transformational moment.

It takes me back to the crib that was in this room fifteen years ago. I see the vintage floral blanket I used to cover her each night in my mind’s eye. I can still see the baby monitor that used to sit in the corner of her bed.

The trip down memory lane continues.

I see Barbie dream houses and a bevy of baby dolls covering the floor, a site which my husband and I named the “baby morgue” because the dolls’ faces were all covered.

There’s a candle burning in the room now as she sleeps, a relaxing habit I think she picked up from me. It smells sweet, the way she used to smell right after we bought her cotton candy at the fair when she was three.

And there she is, my baby who’s no longer a baby, lying beneath the bedroom covers.

She’s growing up, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

For a minute, I close my eyes and try to erase thirteen years. I try to reverse time to where Barbie, Ken, and all their friends still litter the floor.

Then, I open my eyes.

Still, Taylor Swift and Kurt Cobain adorn her walls instead of pictures of Disney princesses.

Time stops for no one, and at that moment, I realize I love bringing her clothes upstairs and hanging them in her closet.

Do you know why?

Because she’s still there, and I know that soon she won’t be.

There’s no excitement that I can turn her room into my own writer’s retreat when she leaves.

I want her to stay forever. I want the overflowing trash to stay right where it is, and I want Taylor Swift blaring from those speakers forever (even though I despise her music).

I want my little girl, who’s no longer a little girl, to be with me forever.

But I know she won’t be.

And this realization takes me into the war zone that belongs to my twenty-year-old.

I sit on his grey checked sheets and take a good hard look around.

Visions emerge of when his father and I stared at his crib when I was eight months pregnant.

Teddy Ruxpin sheets and curtains. Then Winnie the Poo. Then Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Now amid the destruction, I sit and weep because one day the mess won’t be there. One day soon, he’ll call me from his own apartment or college dorm room.

There’ll be no yelling at Call of Duty or laughing at The Office at two am in the morning. No heavy footsteps, sounds of flushing toilets, or yells at Alexa to play obnoxious rap music at top volume.

Only silence.

And this imagined quiet after twenty years of newborn, toddler, and teen noise breaks my heart.

The Bottom Line:

Maybe right now, you’re also folding the clothes your teen should be folding. Maybe you’re hearing the same blaring music drifting from their rooms. Maybe you see Skittles littering their carpet or half-eaten bags of Taki’s lying on their bedside tables.

Just for today, let them be.

No shouting to clean them up, yelling to turn the music down, or scolding them for not cleaning their room when you asked them to two nights ago.

They’re your babies, and they’re there.

And that is the only thing that matters.

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This post was previously published on A Parent Is Born.

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