Are you a serial nagger or are you prone to the occasional full-blown rant when it comes to the question of keeping the house tidy?

ARE “PUT those toys away”, “Don’t just leave that bag there” and “Pick up those clothes off the floor” a soundtrack playing constantly in your children’s ears? Or do you clean after them in silence most of the time, only to erupt into a “Why am I the only person who clears up around here?” rage when resentment overflows?

In the unlikely event that housework is never, ever an issue in your home, you probably employ domestic staff.

We know that having healthy and happy children is what is important and that they are not going to remember that the carpets went unvacuumed for days.

But the cyclical struggle to impose order and seeing it all unravel twice as quickly can become depressing for even the least house-proud among us.

The secret of keeping a family home tidy is to get rid of the children, jokes the chief executive of Parentline, Rita O’Reilly.

Where children go, mess follows – so it is a question of priorities and reaching an acceptable balance for everyone in the house, rather than worrying about what outsiders might think.

“We are deluded about how other people’s houses are a lot of the time,” suggests Heidi Giles, founder of the homemakers’ website, www.clean sheets.ie.

“We all tear around like mad lunatics for an hour before people come. I think that is absolutely fine, as it is done then for you as it is for the other people.”

However, every Thursday night, visitors or no visitors, she goes around her home in Tralee, Co Kerry, “putting everything back where it belongs”.

The key, she suggests, is having a place for everything.

She has a rule that no new item should come into the house unless an old one goes out. “I find it doesn’t get on top of me if I know I can get on top of it,” she adds. “That if I put my mind to it, I could tidy up all those toys . . .”

As a mother of four children, ranging in age from 19 months to five years, university lecturer Pauline Grace found her attitude to housework changing when she took extended leave after the birth of her youngest.

“It becomes more of a priority when you’re home,” she says. “I think if you are working you don’t notice things. In the evening when you come in, the children are your priority.”

Now at their home in Rathfarnham, Dublin, “things irk me more”. She never minded looking at a full laundry basket before. She takes greater pride in having the house right, but admits: “I would hate that to become excessive”.

One stay-at-home mother, who also has four children, says she sometimes wonders: “Do I live or do I tidy?” She confesses that as a family they have missed outside engagements because she was too preoccupied trying to keep on top of the housework.

It runs in the family, she explains. She remembers as a child missing a ferry to France because the aunt they were travelling with insisted on vacuuming her flat (that was going to be empty for the fortnight) before leaving.

A lecturer in the DCU Business School, Grace took a year’s leave of absence to spend time with the children. But sometimes when a child asks her to read a story, she finds herself saying, “Once I have cleaned up this mess here . . . When I was working, even if there had been a puddle on the floor, I would have read them a story when they wanted.”

She does not believe that having a pristine house is a necessary part of child-rearing, but feels that everybody benefits from order.

For a start, it means they can find things without becoming frazzled. “I think children, maybe unbeknownst to themselves, have views on it too,” she suggests.

“We don’t have a dedicated playroom, but have play areas dotted around the house. If the toys are well presented, the children are more enthusiastic in their play. If everything is dumped into the one box – bits of lego and soft toys – they just don’t like it as much.”

She involves the children in tidying up even though it slows things down. In the long term it is about building up independence, she says.

When Grace returns to work at DCU in September, somebody will come into the house to look after the children, so she is conscious that it has to be presentable as a workplace.

In turn she will expect the minder to have the place in order when she returns home.

Messy houses and unwillingness of children to help out come up as issues among callers to Parentline.

It has a “draining effect” on parents, explains O’Reilly.

“They often feel they are narking about something that is really not that important, but if only the child would do a bit, then it would be over and done with.”

She stresses the importance of children helping from an early age. “When you look at children in creches, they are really good at tidying up for themselves, which demonstrates that they can learn, but it does take a bit of discipline.”

It is a good idea to take a factual approach, she suggests. Explain to children that the table needs to be laid or toys have to be cleared away, rather than ordering them to do it.

There is a question of respect for the home, and the parents and siblings who share it, O’Reilly adds.

So while she believes that teenagers can be left to live with the mess they create in their own bedrooms, they should not get away with that around the rest of the house.

swayman@irishtimes.com

1.Involve children in housework from an early age. Praise and gratitude is much more effective than nagging.

2.Declutter and make sure you have a place for everything, to counteract the "I didn't know where to put it" excuses.

3.If everybody leaves their shoes inside the door, you will not only prevent mud being trailed across the carpets but also avoid having to play "hunt the shoes".

4.Insist children eat meals only at the table and do not let them snack around the house. (Parents should follow the same rules!)

5. Whenever a new item comes into the house, make sure an old one goes out.

6. Encourage teenagers to help keep communal areas of the house tidy, but don't get stressed about the state of their bedrooms.

7.If you use a tumble drier, take the clothes out when they are warm and fold flat to avoid having to iron.

8.Remember, there are more important things in life than a tidy home!

‘EVERY FAMILY MEMBER SHOULD BE GLAD TO BE HOME: IF THERE IS CHAOS IN THE HOUSE, IT CAUSES SERIOUS FRICTION’

SIOBHAN WAS at the end of her tether over the mess in the house. She was extra busy at work, her husband always works long hours and her three children, aged 15 to 20, did not help out much. “The cleaning was very much down to me,” she explains. “It all got on top of me and it had become chaotic. I was stretching myself more than I should have been.”

A bad experience the year before had put them off having a cleaner. Then she heard about a new venture, Family Flow, run by Carolynn Doyle, who offers to come into your home and help you organise it from top to bottom, and also works with the whole family on how to keep it that way.

“When she came she said: ‘What do you want?’ and ‘What do you want to change?’,” explains Siobhan. To get order into the house was the simple answer. There was too much clutter hanging around.

They started in the kitchen and, says Siobhan, “once that was cleared it was amazing. I threw out a lot of stuff and still had plenty to keep me going. There was order about the place.” As they worked from room to room, Doyle got to know the children better. “She engaged very gently with them. She realised I was having a bit of a communication problem with them, as you do with your teenage kids.”

She went through the teenagers’ bedrooms individually with them, “which was probably a bit embarrassing”, says Siobhan, but they did co-operate. “I have a great relationship with my kids, but when jobs have to be done I don’t always have the best approach, and I do become a bit of a nag. She got them on board.

“Eight or nine days she was here – that shows how chaotic my house was,” she says. “It made me stop and think where I was putting everything. It breaks old habits. It certainly triggered awareness in me and that is what I was hoping it would instil in our kids.”

There has been a huge improvement, explains Siobhan. “Okay, there is mess on a daily basis, but there is not the chaos that was there before. It is fixable within a couple of hours, and the kids really are pulling together. They don’t get their pocket money on Saturday morning until they have done their jobs, so there is a bit of carrot and stick!”

Siobhan admits she was not broadcasting among friends that she was doing this and rather apologetically asks for her real name not to be used for this article, due to the nature of her work. “I am supposed to be the perfect person, with the perfect life and the perfect home,” she says with a laugh.

Revealing the way your family lives can be highly sensitive. Doyle says confidentiality is an important aspect of her work but personally she does not think people should feel any shame in needing help to get their home the way they want it. “We are all in the same boat.”

Siobhan believes using Family Flow was a good investment in all of their lives. “It is €200 a day, which sounds like a lot of money, but when you get the results you get, it is actually very little money for her. She spent so much time here – and put so much thought into it even when she wasn’t here.”

Doyle is clearly passionate about the business she started last September. A former Montessori teacher, she “adores decluttering” and says her natural bossiness helps. Yet her warm personality and empathy soften the ultra-efficiency.

Growing up in Blackrock, Co Dublin, as the eldest daughter in a family of five boys and three girls, and whose mother died when she was nine, it seems she was born for the job. “I always wanted to be a mum and have a lovely house,” she says. It is clear from her serene-looking home in Glenageary, where she lives with her husband, Dave Ingram, and their four sons, aged 11 to 19, both dreams have been fulfilled.

Her definition of a lovely house is one where every member of the family has that overwhelming feeling of “glad to be home” when they walk in the door. “I know if there is chaos in the house, it causes serious friction,” she comments.

A believer in the benefit of family meals, she also offers to teach people how to make good, healthy dishes, that take no longer than 45 minutes and involve the children in the preparation.

Before Doyle starts with a client, she likes to meet the whole family together. “It is to suss who is on board and who is not – you will get resistance, obviously – and get a feel for what way they would like to go.”

It can take up to two weeks to sort a whole house. Not a shelf, drawer, cupboard or wardrobe is left untouched. She helps families confront all those toys, clothes, books, CDs, photographs and knick-knacks which have accumulated over the years.

“All along you are creating really good storage and making things look smarter, so that you want to go into that room,” she says.

Surprisingly, she has found teenagers co-operative. “It’s funny – because I am not their mum, the gratitude is phenomenal!” They recognise the joy they get from an orderly room, she says.

“They know their room will get messy again, because it takes a while to form new habits but they know there is a route back.”

• For more information on Family Flow, see www.familyflow.ie or tel: 086-8219006.