TELL ME ABOUT IT

Dear Carolyn: I live in a home with two indoor house cats with a litter box. My 8th-grade daughter is supposed to be responsible for sweeping and scooping litter but does a terrible, lackadaisical job. It’s in my laundry room, where I smell and step all over scattered litter. Half the time the litter appears untouched despite my constant pleas.

I’m sick of constantly reminding and chiding her to clean. I secretly want the cats gone, as the litter stinks and also they shed everywhere, and I hate my clean laundry being near filthy cat litter. She just laughs and says I’m too picky.

What can I do? I am ready to move out rather than continue being ignored.

– C.

You can please, please be the parent. Please.

As the adult and head or co-head of the household, you decide how “picky” you are. Right now, by letting your daughter blow off her chores and laugh at you, you are deciding instead to take orders from a middle-schooler. And eventually, quite possibly, launch an entitled and disrespectful person into the citizenry.

Please, I beg you, don’t. Not another one.

The older she gets, the less effective these measures will be, so apply them now:

Presumably your daughter has friends? Hobbies? A phone? A favorite restaurant? Presumably you take her back to school on a Friday or Saturday for a game or a dance or a play her friends are in? Presumably she wants you to buy her things beyond basic sustenance?

These are privileges. Access to every single one of them needs to be, and has needed to be since she was

behind a door she can unlock only through satisfactory completion of her assigned chores.