Instructing kids to clean up their mess isn't just wholesome fun, but it also teaches a valuable life skill! Might not be much "fun" for them to start, but kids actually benefit from having responsibilities. And, if you make it a precondition for something they want to do, they'll be motivated!
For me, this was rather the beginning of my insanely deep hate for authorities and the power that they (ab)use.
But yes kids are hard, I would love to see comparison of 19th century 10-kid family and now... I feel like we are doing something wrong to have raising kids well so hard, but maybe its just that circumstances and expectations have changed completely
Families with 10 kids basically abandon most of them, after the first 1-2 and probably except for the last 1-2. Bigger kids take care of smaller ones, they become surrogate teenage parents.
Humans are quite smart and so kids manage to survive, but it doesn't mean being a kid in such a family is a good life comparatively to being a kid today, in your regular family with 1-2-3 kids.
Do they? I’m not sure what I learned from my parents insisting that I “clean” my room.
I think parents live in hope that their kids can learn that value earlier than they themselves have, or at least help share their lessons learned with their kids - this is true of many things in parent/child relationship -> we want/hope better for our kids.
And let's not minimize the "I'm tired, I had to clean your room every night for the past 3 days/weeks/months/years/decades, you need to put some effort too!" aspect of course :->
It works various degrees of well or poorly with various kids, parents, and circumstances - like virtually anything else in parenting.
Might as well be something that's appreciated even as an adult :-)
Same thing applies as adults and non-toy items too.
Toys become a lot more attractive once there's space to play and the pieces that belong together are not mixed up with a bunch of random junk.