Effective strategies, please

I always expect the dcs to take their dishes to the sink or counter next to the sink after lunch or supper, but I generally tidy up after breakfast. I think it's mainly because I'm shooing them along to get ready for school, and it's faster for me to do it. Since they tidy up after themselves at later meals, I know they're capable, but it's just become a habit.

I think choosing your battles is important, as someone else has said. And I agree that a smack for not clearing up crumbs is rather over the top.

Will she respond to a cooperative approach? Such as "Please take the dishes to the sink while I wipe down the table" or something like that?

Smacking a 14 year old for not clearing up a few crumbs? All I can say is 'Crumbs'!

thatbags, look on the bright side - at least she is eating breakfast. If DD2 could escape from the house from age about 15 without a morsel passing her lips then she did. If she grabbed a yogurt and banana then I heaved a sigh of relief. She did not and does not have eating issues, by the way, she was just not a breakfast person.

And always late, I should add.

All I can add is that our 3 DDs reduced their surroundings to such squalor that even the mice turned their noses up (and sometime their toeses too) but now in their 30's they are talented and instinctive homemakers with hygiene standards way in excess of mine. Live with it - there's worse she could be doing

Part of it, though, is the annoyance at having to remember to ask her to do it in the first place. When you are either still waking up or busy doing something else.

DS has a short-term memory problem, although very intelligent. I used to make him recite back to me in the morning everything he needed to get done as he could only remember one thing at a time. It went something like 'dishwasher, table, teeth, hair, prep, music, games stuff, phone'. Then I would find that I had forgotten to remind him to switch off the lights upstairs. That always drove me mad.

His flatmates at uni last year soon cottoned on, I was amused to see that someone had placed post-its everywhere for him!

Have you ever sat her down and asked her, in a happy moment, staying very calm, why she doesn't do it? With me and my mother it was mould-growing mugs in my bedroom. It was a big house so I was left to fend for myself until she started to run short of mugs, I had a sink in my room so she just couldn't understand it, she took it personally - until I told her eventually quite truthfully that I was studying and comparing the various stages of mould on my coffee.

I can't believe someone has actually advocated smacking!

And she may be called minibags but she could be bigger than thatbags.
DD2 would be calling Childline!

I thought that, too! I had a huge row with my daughter and she called me an old cow, so I slapped her. Then I thought - uh-oh, she's bigger than me! Luckily she was so shocked, as I have never been into smacking, that she didn't slap me back!

However, she has referred to the incident a couple of times since.