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[quote=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.
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