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Daughter inspires mom to create devilshly clever ‘mystery trashbag’ solution to her messy room.

She chose the nuclear option.

Daughter inspires mom to create devilshly clever ‘mystery trashbag’ solution to her messy room.

When you’re a kid, you hate hearing your parents nag. “Clean your room! Do your homework! Take out the trash!” But parents hate having to nag just as much.


Alice Velásquez from Indiana couldn’t stand having to tell her daughter to clean her room, so she took the nuclear option. She packed everything in her room into trash bags and made her work her way towards getting them back by doing chores. For each bag, she charged $25.

The kicker? The bags were packed randomly so she didn’t know what was in each one. Looking for your curling iron? Could be in this bag … or this bag?

Velásquez posted a picture of her devilish deed on Facebook where it was shared over 12,000 times.

The caption reads:

What do you do when you are DONE telling your teenage daughters to stop letting their room look like homeless people live there? You put everything (YES EVERYTHING) into plastic bags and you sell it back to them for $25 a bag (and they have to earn the money doing chores). The best part? The bags were collected as they were found in the room- random! So their $25 could buy a bag of dirty clothes, it could buy a bag of trash or it could buy their soccer gear. ?#?MayTheOddsBeEverInYourFavor?

While just about everyone loved Velásquez’s solution to her daughter’s unkempt living room, she also got a lot of vicious messages from the Mommy blogger crowd.

One of them even threatened to report her to the police. Velásquez stood up for her parenting decisions with another Facebook post. “All of my parenting choices are just that, mine!” she wrote.

“My children are all loved, treasured, very well cared for, social, active in band, choir, church youth group, soccer, track, swimming, scouts, study buddies, amongst many other family activities,” she continued. “So before you judge me, come spend a day with children who have been raised with respect, who have chores and responsibilities and who have parents that take an active role in parenting and then form your own informed opinion.”

So the big question is: Did her daughter earn her things back? “YES!” wrote Velasquez. “She has, and her super siblings all volunteered for extra chores to help her earn faster too… So not only was it a lesson for my oldest daughter, but a great… family building exercise as well.”

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