Is it child abuse...

to take advantage of your child’s neurosis for your own personal gain?

FS#2 (whose story I will eventually get around to summarizing) had a chaotic childhood. One of the outcomes of this chaotic childhood is his need to keep his personal space neat and organized. Almost obsessively so. Now I am only an average housekeeping (as mentioned in another post), quite frankly I usually have better things to do than clean, and now the FS#2 is becoming more comfortable living here, his personal space is expanding beyond his bedroom.

So when he becomes a little stressed, like after being trapped in the house because of back-to-back-to-back snowstorms, he cleans. Yesterday, he reorganized the junk room, cleaned the living room and kitchen (Ha! He now just demonstrated that he CAN indeed put dishes in the dishwasher!). Now I should add that FS#2 has a few issues with ADHD, so he cleans like a whirling dervish and if anyone has worked with ADHD kids, they know that sometimes attention deficient can translate into unreasonable focused, so it is hard to direct or guide his cleaning efforts. So he has a tendency to clean what he thinks needs attention and not where I would prefer. Also remember that his cleaning jags generally only occur when he is stressed, the rest of the time I still have to nag him to pick up after his self, put the dishes in the dishwasher, put the milk away, take his clothes upstairs etc... you know typically kid behavior. That all being said...

is it child abuse to loll around the house while your child cleans?