Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsCute Book To Reinforce the Maker of the Mess is the Cleaner of the Mess
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 27, 2017
This is one of several of the books of this series I purchased for my kindle after I noticed that our son seemed to find the kindle versions more motivating. For our little man, who has some more specialized needs, he's pretty much a mess making ninja, and this is something we've been working on for a while in various incarnations. Right now, the current stand is over him emptying out his entire dresser and removing all of the red balls from his ball pit every night. We're for the moment ignoring his fondness for dumping all of his blocks behind his bed and just leaving them there after each occasion and waiting for him to request them. If he wants them, he can ask for them and help clean them at that time to get them out.
So, we clean the other two up every morning though, and at present, it still requires an ABA reinforcer to get the job done. I bought this book because it's very simple in the sentence structure and reinforces the idea that if you make a mess, you need to be the one to pick it up. I think this book would be stronger with a why, like "we clean messes so people don't trip on things and get hurt" or "we put things away so they don't get ruined," but I know point blank our sweet little dude doesn't give a crud about whether or not most things get ruined, and I'm pretty sure if he could verbalize it, he'd just say "well, why don't you just watch where you're going? You can see my line of balls from all the way across the room...geesh, how hard could it be to avoid that!!!" So, I'm pretty sure this is one of those areas where the why isn't going to be as helpful because social why's like "it makes people happy" that you use for why we say 'hi' don't hold a lot of weight with him at this time. It's more about what he wants to do and what he doesn't want to do.
So our approach has been more towards "You made the mess, you clean up the mess (every bit of it). You make less mess, you have less mess to clean." And our little man does not like to clean, not even a little bit, so that I think is where our hope rests on this one. I'm on the verge of being cautiously optimistic we're near the end of the dresser battle for now because we've gone three days without the dresser being emptied, and he's only pulled out 6 or 7 balls the last few days. But I think it's nice to have a book the reinforce with him that the mess maker is the mess cleaner, and I think this book does a good job of that. And I like that it's got Little Tiger roaring in a couple of spots, because that's a sound he is willing to make without a motivator attached to the other end, so it's a fun thing to do when we're reading it. I also chuckled a bit that all of the books Little Tiger picks up are from this Hello Genius line...can't blame them for advertising that way ;)
As I said, this is a hill we've been on a while, I don't imagine this is going to fix every problem we've ever had with this, but it's a nice support. I'd say probably best for a developmentally typical 18-24 month old kiddo, but for our son who is 5 and has developmental delays and some specialized needs, I still find this very useful.
