We had a once-a-week cleanup rule when the kids were little. We all cleaned up the house for the weekend, kids just had to pickup their rooms. When they didn't (as is perfectly normal, pushing boundaries), I would tidy up by throwing everything into a big garbage bad and putting it up high in the garage (sort of a timeout for their belongings). Set a timer at the start of the process so they have a chance to do it themselves. After a few times, they got the message, but there were some times at first when they would lose their shit - that was pretty harrowing.

Yep, I've done a variation of that as well, to ensure compliance. One time a full garbage bag full of toys got thrown out.

But the meta-point is: kids are all different. Parenting advice happens to be mostly written by people whose children are already pretty well behaved and don't need much (if any) correction. These people think that they're really great at parenting, but in all likelihood the larger reason is that their children aren't shitheads to begin with. Not everyone is lucky like that, and humans are _very_ hard to debug. This is particularly annoying if the parent wasn't a shithead him/herself: there's this implicit assumption that the kids will be just like parents, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that it'll turn out like that.

In fact anecdotal evidence from my friends would suggest that very few people are "lucky". Only two kids (out of something like 30 in my circle) are what I'd call "good kids". One is a really smart girl (good at math, plays chess, in general just tends to do what's good for herself), and another kid has mild Asperger's, so he's in his own world: does super well in the accelerated program in school, knows how to code, but doesn't know how to interact with people, at all, and has no friends, or desire to have friends.