Miles Clasen recently received a corn snake for his birthday. To keep the pet, though, he must keep his room clean.

Avery Stejskal, 5, left, and her sister Sydney, 2, are in charge of picking up their Barbie dolls and accessories at their house.

Twenty dimes might not seem like a lot. But to Avery, 5, and Sydney, 2, it’s a small fortune. It’s enough to make the two girls clean their rooms weekly without complaining.

Their mother, Carisa Stejskal, says tactics that make her kids clean around the house can quickly grow stale.

“We use different methods at each age level,” Stejskal says. “So far this method is working well. Hopefully it continues to work once the novelty has worn off.”

Each week, Carisa posts a chart on the wall near the girls’ rooms. The chart is spattered with pictures of dimes, each representing payment for keeping a clean room. If the girls leave their shoes in the hallway or pile their dress-up clothes on the floor, Carisa scratches a dime from the chart. When the girls lose money, Carisa calls through the house, making sure they know what’s happened.

Carisa’s clever ruse works: After they learn about the loss, Avery and Sydney scramble to their rooms and pluck colorful purses and plastic Barbies from the floor to carefully place them on shelves.

It’s one solution to a common problem: how to get kids to clean their rooms. The easy solution is to have mom plow in and do the cleaning. That’s the wrong approach, says Kevin Leman, author of the best-selling “Have a New Kid by Friday.”

“Kids need to learn that this is a home and not a hotel,” Leman says. “In a hotel, there’s room service, food service, and nothing is expected of you.”

To instill lifelong habits, it’s important to start coaching kids early on. Children are like wet cement, Leman says: They’re malleable and easy to deal with. The opposite holds true: The longer parents wait to teach healthy cleaning habits, the less likely they’ll stick.

Lawrence residents Victoria and Randy Phillippe were soft on their three sons, ages 15, 19 and 22. Victoria says by the time the boys entered junior high, it was too late — the boys were messy, and they were going to stay that way.

“Our boys have blessed us in so many ways,” Victoria says. “They study hard, work hard, get great grades, but can’t seem to clean their rooms.”

Taking time to cajole or coerce her boys into cleaning wasn’t worth it, she says. Her youngest, Brad, can easily sink a basketball into a goal, but he can’t toss a smelly T-shirt into a hamper.

“The drawers in his room are a nightmare,” Victoria says, “so what I started doing was cleaning it myself.”

Weakening, not helping

When children don’t clean quickly enough, it can be tempting to do it for them. But this weakens children, Leman says.

“There are parents who will do anything for their kids,” Leman says. “That’s because they think they’re helping them, and really they’re not helping them. They’re disabling them.”

Early training is important if parents expect children to help clean. How early? As soon as they can walk, says Leman.

Whitney Marcellino, vice president of Lawrence MOMS Club North, has already started training her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Larson, to clean around the house. Marcellino’s method: a cleanup song.

The lyrics are simple and repetitive: “Clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere. Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share.”

“Larson really gets into picking up, and by the end of the several repeated choruses, the toys are off the ground,” Marcellino says.

Money talks

Lauren Reinhold and her husband, Kent Clasen, use financial incentives to urge neat habits out of their 8-year-old son, Miles.

“We tie his allowance to cleaning his room and helping around the house,” Lauren says. “If he’s not adequately helpful, he might not get all of his allowance.”

Usually, the mere threat of reducing Miles’ allowance is enough to stir him into action. Even with the financial payoff, though, Miles sometimes struggles.

“He’ll sometimes get distracted by toys in his room,” says Lauren.

Go figure: When asked to clean up toys, children want to play with them instead. One way to dodge distractions is to keep tasks small and work times short.

Picking up toys or folding laundry for 15 to 20 minutes at a time is all Lauren asks of Miles. And he’s usually happy to abide.

“I clean what mom asks me to clean,” he says. “It’s not that bad.”

And recently, Miles is a little happier when he’s cleaning. He just got a red corn snake for his birthday. To get the snake, Miles had to help his mom overhaul his room, pitching old toys, putting books on shelves and tossing trash. To keep the snake, though, Miles has to keep the room clean.

“It’s way cleaner and more organized in there,” Lauren says.