Good Housemate Qualities to Teach Your Kids
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Once your kids are in high school or beyond, it’s time to switch gears and make sure they know how to be good housemates. If you’ve included them in housekeeping, you’re set, but let’s doublecheck what you need to know to be a good roommate.
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We’ve got five kids at home, four of them legal adults. It’s a different ball game when your children have to sign the rental agreement along with you.
(To clarify: two of our adult children are in college and commute to campus, saving 1000s of dollars every year, and two are college grads in the workforce. Within 6 months of graduation, our kids start paying us for room and board.)
Yes, the lease is a formality, but it’s also a signal that we, and more importantly, they are in a different season of life.
We don’t expect our kids will be at home forever. But honestly, I’m not gonna rush it. At the moment everyone gets along, but more importantly we get to develop our relationship with them as adults, walking through harder experiences like job searches, breakups, and generally navigating the crazy place we call the world today.
As their mom, I want to make sure that I’m sending them out into that world ready to be good housemates. Whether they share their next home with a spouse, friend, or total stranger, I want them to know how to be good roommates.
In a way, we’ve been doing this since they were very young, teaching them how to resolve conflict and do their chores. I don’t think I was conscious of that when I started developing our systems and neither were they.
These days I’m more intentional so that they understand, yes, this is how to live respectfully with someone else.
6 Things to Know So You Can Be a Good Housemate
Where to leave your stuff (or not)
In dorms or hotels, they call the living room, lounge, and TV room “public spaces”. It’s probably the best term that we could adopt at home.
Living spaces tends to imply, “spread your life around,” while the term public spaces indicates it’s not so private, and therefore, your life’s stuff doesn’t belong in public, but in private.
A general rule for cohabitating is to keep the public spaces free of your personal belongings, especially if you have a designated private space to store them.
If clutter continues to be an issue, the author of The House That Cleans Itself suggests building storage space into the design of the public space for people to drop their bags and stuff.
For instance, I have a drawer in a public space designated for purses to go so that we don’t see them all over the place. There’s a line of pegs by the garage door for keys, etc.
How to share a bathroom
Adopting the dorm style method of sharing a bathroom among many people works really well, provided you tool people up.
With a bathroom tote to cart toiletries to and from the bathroom and an after-shower spray to reduce the soap buildup, we’ve got a system that appears to be working. I don’t use the two bathrooms the kids share, but I haven’t heard much in the way of complaint.
As your kids become teens and young adults, I find that including them in the solutions and problem-solving gets buy-in. Don’t barge in with an idea that may or may not work.
Let them suggest some solutions. In this way, they’ll have practice to do someday troubleshooting with roommates and spouses.
How to label and store your food
I have a small sign on the fridge next to a set of pens and labels, so that everyone who wants to save or “claim” food items has an easy way to do so. Management will not be held responsible for unlabeled food being consumed by others.
Label it or lose it.
(So far, eating someone else’s food that has been labeled has not been an issue. Everyone here gets an A+ in “respects the property of others”.)
Likewise, we have ground rules (set by the chief cook) for how to package up food. In particular, it must be in a clear container with a lid; none of this saran wrap flying off and open cups tipping over.
In this way we don’t have massive spillage that Someone has to clean up.
How to leave the laundry
Teaching my children, aged 4 to 15, how to do their own laundry was a momentous occasion and one of my biggest parenting wins to date. I do not do laundry.
That said, we do have some basic guidelines for how to leave the laundry room. Namely, no clothes left behind.
I purchased abundant laundry baskets when we moved it so that things can be easily delivered to bedrooms and not clog up the laundry room. Since it’s the passage way from the garage, this is extra important.
How to clean house
I suppose some households have cleaning services so there’s a built-in mechanism for every one to clean up after him or herself. That has never been our household.
Our kids have always had chores to do, but these have changed over the years depending on how busy they are outside the home. There’s a general guideline to clean up your stuff, but we have to all put in more effort for the housework bit.
While I do lean into my homemaker life, I don’t believe my responsibility is to be my children’s maid, especially my adult children. Thankfully, teaching them chores so many years ago has paid off.
When their bathrooms get scary, they clean them. When their designated refrigerator in the garage needs help, someone steps up.
At least once a month in anticipation of game night, we do a deeper scrub of things. Several kids have learned during these deep cleaning sessions that it is better to tidy often during the week than have to dig out on the weekends.
Generally speaking the kids are all good about loading the dishwasher and washing their dishes. We’ve recently instituted a post-dinner clean up as I try to upgrade our baseline of kitchen clean.
How to know to be quiet
Inevitably in group living, some people will be louder than others. Depending on the home, the noise will be manageable or not.
Our kids and we have worked through some noise issues, sometimes graciously (kids) and sometimes not (us). We are all works in progress.
We’ve made adjustments so that louder situations don’t make someone miserable. We’ve reorganized the garage so that there’s workout space.
An unanticipated blessing of that is room for kids to congregate with friends for Warhammer painting or game play after hours. This keeps a lot of the noise in the garage instead of the house.
We shifted the start time of our Monthly Game Night to start earlier so that it could end earlier. Turns out no one knew the ending time, and we parents didn’t want to be those parents who kick people out.
The kids are working on a system for being mindful of the time and winding things down. Yay for independent and courteous housemates!
It’s possible that you’re already raising good housemates by holding your kids accountable and teaching them chores, but I think there’s another level to be achieved, the one where they have independence and agency, when they choose to take care of things of their own accord without direction from someone else.
If you have older kids living at home, even for the summer or in between times, be sure to have the conversation. There is a definite shift in your relationship from parent and child to grown housemates.
What do you think?
I’d be honored if you chimed in the comments section. What do you think?
I’ve been doing all these things for a long time. My kids aren’t doing it at home, but hopefully just like they behave better for other people, they’ll respect housemates more.