One TikTok mom of four is getting a lot of attention for her brutally honest videos, rejecting the trend of cleaning up everything to look perfect before filming to create the illusion that people who have children can live in an episode of House Hunters.
In reality, households with young children are perpetual disasters because little kids don’t and can’t care about mess — they’re too busy running around discovering everything in their world.
Meanwhile, parents like Bri James are too busy making sure their kids don’t fall off or choke on something to be constantly picking up after them, so messes happen and rapidly pile up. Instead of trying to hide this, James specifically shows this in her videos and admits to how long it can sometimes take her and her husband to begin to clean it up.
James has described herself and her husband as “messy” and “lazy,” but many commenters have reassured her that what she shows in her videos is actually extremely normal for parents with multiple kids. James and her husband have four of them, all under the age of eight, and she homeschools the two older ones. It would take some kind of ultra-motivated polycule to keep that house clean.
“I know I’m going to get roasted,” she says in one particularly popular video. “I know it, but this is what happens when two really lazy adults have four kids and don’t clean up after themselves because, yeah, it’s a mess. Four days, guys. I’ve not done dishes or picked things up for four days and this is what my house looks like.”
James stresses that it’s not dirty, which could pose a health risk to the kids, but only messy. Anyone with kids should immediately understand what she means. She also said that she posted the video to help keep herself accountable and motivate herself to clean, but it was so relatable that it got just under 18 million views anyway.
“That’s actually good for 4 kids, we have 2 and it sometimes gets that way,” a commenter wrote. “Don’t beat yourself up over it, it’s normal.”
Cleaning also isn’t easy for everybody, especially those who may struggle with motivation or focus. James figured out that if she filmed the mess for other people to see, it would help her to fully clean it up so that they could view the “after” result. She explained her process in an interview with BuzzFeed after the one video went mega-viral.
“I am messy. My husband is messy. We know that,” she said. “And for years we faked being clean and tidy all the time and I was tired of it. I felt like I couldn’t be my real self by pretending. So I would post a real, daily messy house video with six people and four pets in the home, then go on cleaning it because I know it needed to be done but, by filming it, I couldn’t quit halfway without showing the end result.”
If it works, it works. James has also posted timelapse videos showing herself and her husband cleaning, proving that it does indeed happen. Her husband helps as much as he can, but James says that his schedule is “odd” because he’s an active duty military member.
Although she’s asked for kindness, some commenters have still been rude, accusing her of lying about the amount of time it took for the mess to build up or her motives for posting the videos. James seems to often express doubt around her assertions that it’s okay for parents to have a messy home and get down on herself for not being perfect.
At the same time, she’s expressed that she’s happy to show other parents that they’re not bad people for failing to live up to Instagram standards.
“We see so many Pinterest and Instagram-worthy homes that don’t show a speck of dirt, but to me they don’t seem real,” she said. “They could be, but it’s not real to me.”
“I know I will never have a home like that while my kids are this young. Even if I cleaned 24/7, it’s an unachievable goal. So I wanted to show other moms and dads or anyone really that it’s OK to be messy. It’s normal. And as long as I do better than I did yesterday, I’m happy with that progression.”