Raise your hand if you’ve never gotten busy at work or with your family and fallen behind on chores. I bet you can’t. I personally have a corner in my office where there’s just a pile of stuff because that’s where I’ve been stashing all the things I just don’t have time to deal with right now, like a bag of clothes I need to take to Goodwill to donate and a side table I replaced but I’m not sure if I want to get rid of. I’ll clean up that corner eventually, but life is busy! We’re all adults here. We get that.
That’s why I do not understand the hate that one mom got when she posted a video cleaning her teen’s bedroom. TikTok mom and creator Audrey filmed herself tidying up the space, and in the caption she wrote, “My daughter has been working so hard lately. Getting herself to 6 am practice, school… so I really wanted to surprise her by tidying up her room.”
That’s super relatable! So what’s up with all the trolls who headed to the comments to accuse Audrey of enabling her kid to be lazy, messy, and dirty?
Luckily, this mama had just the right clap-back in mind. She posted a follow-up video with a voiceover where she offered some more explanation for why she decided to clean her daughter’s room — and gave some internet strangers a little lesson on empathy and grace for others.
“I posted a video last night, and in fairness to the trolls, I did post it hoping that the trolls would get those thumbs a-movin,’” Audrey said. “Sometimes it’s better to illustrate your point with examples.”
She continued, “I surprised my daughter by cleaning her room for her. She’s been getting herself up for 6 a.m. practices. She gets herself to school. She’s out of the house before the rest of us have even woken up. Keep in mind she’s 12. In return for all that she’s been doing, I thought it would be a nice treat if I just did a quick speed clean of her room. It was no big deal.”
Yeah, sounds like no big deal.
Audrey added, “The point of this video is that you need to extend grace. That’s what I did for my daughter. She had fallen behind on her room and I helped her.”
As a parent, she explained, one of the most powerful things anyone can do is give their kids grace sometimes.
“It costs you nothing, and it creates this ripple effect of kindness. We all have setbacks, we all have failures, we all make mistakes — and if you say you don’t you’re lying,” she said. “By extending grace we are spreading kindness, we are spreading compassion. If you can’t extend grace to your own children then there’s no way you’re going to extend it to anyone else in the world and that’s a scary world to live in. And extending grace to others makes it easier for us to extend it to ourselves and that’s vital for our mental health. So if you watched the video yesterday or you’re watching this one today and you’re thinking negative thoughts, ask yourself, ‘Am I quick to judge, be resentful, be negative or am I quick to extend grace or ask yourself have I ever stumbled and wish grace had been extended to me?”
Preach, mama!
In the comments, other parents offered their support for this extremely important point.
“Exactly I did the same thing for my 23-year-old daughter who works full-time and is a full-time college student. She’s 100% independent. I just want to take some off stress off her plate,” another mom wrote.
“You are SUCH a sweet mama. I wish I had experienced grace like this in my young life, but this is a great reminder to extend it to others now. Thank you!” another commenter added.
Let this be a reminder for all of us to extend some grace today.
