How to perform a room search
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Anonymous
| Has anybody ever performed a room search on their teenage son or daughter and if so, how did you go about it? Where did you look? |
Anonymous
Anonymous
| Two teenagers. Never searched their rooms. Both in college now. |
Anonymous
|
Look EVERYWHERE. In jewelry boxes, pencil cases, under lamps, under folded clothes, and so on.
Also, make sure to do a drug test. |
Anonymous
Helpful. |
Anonymous
|
Since you posted this very specific question about how to conduct the search rather than about whether you should conduct a search, I'm assuming you've already determined that the circumstances are severe enough to require this extremely invasive and insulting, but unfortunately sometimes necessary, procedure. Are you looking for drugs, alcohol, weapons, and other contraband substances like that? If so, you could possibly adapt the process I advocate for parents helping their younger children clean a room that’s completely out of control if the child has been resistant to gentler attempts at assistance or outright defiant:
Step 1: clean out, strip, and clean up the entire room. EVERYTHING out of the room except for a freshly made bed and empty furniture including emptying the closet, dressers, bookshelf, desk, etc. Dust everything, vacuum, do all the deep cleaning while it’s empty. I know you wanted a room search and not cleaning, but this way you’re likely to find if they’ve managed to use the actual furniture to create a place to hide something illegal or inappropriate. Step 2: sort the stuff. If you *already found* the contraband while taking the stuff out of the room, I would have the kid in question do this job under your supervision as part of the consequences for having/using whatever stuff was found. If you haven’t found anything yet, you might want to do the sorting yourself in case your kid uses it as a chance to conceal whatever is still there. - Food wrappers, used tissues, stained stuff, and gross stuff is trash. Throw it out now never to be seen again. - Random “trash-like” stuff that an artsy teen will eagerly claim is “art supplies” goes in one area, pile, or trash bag (clearly marked to NOT throw out yet). Buy her a bin or two for somewhere in her room. Let her know that she may keep X number of bins full of art stuff provided that what is not in use is contained within the securely closed bins, and then let her pick what stays and what goes. - School work. He automatically keeps anything from the current school year. Older work – limit to one folder or section of a file box per year; have him pick what is important enough to keep and what can go. - Clothing. Figure out what she has room for in her dressers/closet. Let her know she must store or donate anything that doesn't fit and that she may only keep X number of each garment (up to the number you determined can fit in the drawer). - Books. Same as clothes, he can keep what he has room for on the bookshelf. - Random miscellaneous items that didn’t fit in above. Same process. This will take a ton of work, and probably cause quite a bit of teen drama, but if it’s gotten to the point that you feel a room search is necessary you want to do one where you’re almost guaranteed to find the stuff. You’ll have gone through everything at least twice – once on the way out and once on the way back in – so if stuff is there, this search will probably find it unless they’ve hidden it in the mattress, or the walls, or the baseboards. An added benefit is, that the kid will have an *extremely* clean room so if the room search turned stuff up he will have a tidy and boring place to spend time while grounded and if the room search did not turn up anything – in which case your kid will be pretty angry at you for this – the really clean room will mean much lighter and easier chores for at least the next few weeks. Good luck. |
Anonymous
On drugs |
Anonymous
Thanks. This is helpful. I am not looking for anything in particular, but we have been having attitude issues and I want to make it very clear to my teen that if he chooses to act in a particular way, his rights to privacy and trust are demolished. It is less about actually finding things, and more asserting inserting our authority as parents that unfortunately, has gone by the wayside in the past few months. |
Anonymous
I'm that poster back again - glad you found my post helpful. That being said, your reply raises a few questions in my mind as I would not generally advocate the approach I posted in anything less than a situation where you have an actual suspicion that the teen is on drugs, engaging in behavior that could hurt himself or others, or breaking the law. I'm not really one to try to micromanage others' parenting, so you can feel free to ignore the rest of my post if you like. But, would you be open to considering other approaches to dealing with the attitude problem that stop short of something this drastic? Doing something like this might honestly ruin your teen's trust in you and hamper your loving relationship for years or possibly forever. In a drugs/alcohol/crime type situation, I would say the parental duty to protect the child makes it worth the risk, but I hesitate to make the same assessment for something you describe as attitude issues and loss of appropriate respect for parental authority. To be clear, I consider myself a very strict parent so a bad attitude, lack of respect for authority, and insubordination would never fly in my house and I'm absolutely not advocating you let that slide. If you decide the room search route is right for your family, that is entirely your business and I completely respect that as your choice, but I just wanted to mention a few possible alternatives because I hope to help you avoid any possible regrets if the method I suggested turns out to be too harsh for the situation. Have you sat your teen down and had a very serious talk laying down the law - sort of an "I've been seeing X Y and Z disrespectful behaviors, and that doesn't work in this family; let me reiterate our expectations" type chat? How was that received? Does grounding work? For pervasive attitude and defiance, we would probably go with room restriction where the kid is either at school/doing homework, eating a family meal or doing a family activity, doing (extra) chores, or in her very boring room which had been emptied of all electronics. Is your child involved in a sport, an extra-curricular activity, or a faith community? If this bad attitude has been cropping up outside the home (or even if it hasn't) could a respected adult mentor from an activity like that have a chat with him to serve as sort of a wake up call? Would you consider having him get involved in community service/volunteering? Perhaps something like that would serve as its own kind of wake up call to knock the attitude off towards the people who've made his life of relative comfort possible. |
Anonymous
| I agree with immediate PP. WE've done a room search before but it was drug related (and we found them). In your situation I would not do this. Asserting your authority in this way will backfire. I guarantee it. |
Anonymous
|
I don't understand why a room search is in response to a bad attitude. You're just going to make the problem worse.
My room search was for a weapon (not found and now, with more facts, believe DC never had it). Under mattresses, window sills, behind curtains, went through every clothes drawer, behind books. |
Anonymous
Nope. They've each tried some weed but never kept any themselves. |
Anonymous
| OP here. Okay, how else to we make it crystal clear to our son that WE are the parents and he is the child? He apparently cannot remember that fact. |
Anonymous
Jesus, you just randomly picked "room search' to assert that fact? How strange. |
Anonymous
Not mine either. But I feel for the parents who would need to. I wonder if an off duty police officer or addiction counselor could be hired to do this. |