Persuade your teen to help with chores
Is your teenagers' bedroom a disaster area? Do not worry about it; it is their personal space, the one place where they feel they can define themselves. You should allow your teen to keep this space personal, but lay down some ground rules; such as no dirty crockery, and dirty clothes in the laundry basket. When it comes to doing chores, it's amazing how that energetic basketball player suddenly becomes too weak to carry trash!
This is an area for negotiation, especially if you give your child a spending allowance or pocket money; no chores, no money is the basic rule. The next step is negotiating which chores your teen does and to keep this under control it is best to pay them weekly. You are teaching your teenager that money needs to be earned, but good practice is to allow some of the pocket money to be given without expecting chores in return.
Be fair about how chores are divided amongst family members; all members of the family should do chores, but, if your son always get the gross jobs and your daughter, the clean, easy jobs, you are setting up a potential area of conflict. Ask your teenager which chores they do not mind doing, you may be surprised to learn that they will happily mow the lawn, especially if it is nice weather and you take them a cold drink while they do it.
Be consistent about the chores; have a roster on the fridge door, identify daily, weekly, monthly chores and stick to it. You can allow some "trading" of chores; giving your teen the chance to do a bit of bartering with other family members is good practice for later life, haggling with an auto salesman, for example!
Make sure before the chore is completed that your teenager knows how to do it; they do not have as much experience as you do. Do not criticize badly done chores; explain patiently that it needs redoing as it not quite how you want it. Above all, resist the temptation to do a chore yourself; some kids will deliberately do something badly in the hope that you will simply take over and do it for them!
Back to that bedroom; you have the right to expect a certain level of hygiene, but apart from that, stay out! Enter to collect the laundry basket, or better still, get them to do their own laundry, but do not go poking around their room moaning about how messy it is; it is their private space.