“Trigger Warning”: Mom Films Herself Cleaning Her Car, Receives Backlash

Keeping your home clean is a job. The same goes for the car. And it’s no secret that when there are kids involved, keeping things clean becomes an even bigger challenge.

One netizen, a mom of four named Amanda, going by the moniker of ‘demandaconda333’, has recently gone viral for her pursuit of cleanliness in the family car. She let her followers in on the process in a series of TikTok videos on the car cleanout, which left the netizens divided – while some applauded the mom for doing a good job, others believed people shouldn’t “normalize living this way”.

Keeping your home or your car clean can be quite a headache—you might spend the whole day scrubbing and vacuuming, only for it to go back to the mess it was just a couple of days later.

When things get messy so quickly, finding the motivation to clean again might not be easy. Sometimes, we might even let things get somewhat out of hand before we take control of the situation again. Though, what “out of hand” means can differ quite significantly from person to person.

In her video, Amanda admitted that the state her car was in “was not right.” As a matter of fact, she started the video with a trigger warning, saying that it was going to be ugly, and continued to add that the car was something she’d become “super blinded to.” Which, to a greater or lesser degree, we all probably have had happen at least once or twice in our lives.

A survey carried out among drivers in the UK by Fleet Alliance found that as much as 6% of them never clean their cars. Though they are a minority, so are those who clean their cars every week (3%). Most respondents shared that they clean their vehicle every two to three months (26%), less than once every six months (22%), or every month (19%).

Bearing in mind that a clean home can make us feel better—according to the Cleaning Institute, roughly nine in ten people feel their best (both mentally and physically) when they have a clean home—it’s safe to assume that a clean car can have a positive impact on its driver, too.

Despite the positive effect a clean home has on a person, the Cleaning Institute reports that every fifth American finds cleaning tasks quite overwhelming. Delving deeper into what chores people tend to dread the most, YouGov found that it’s laundry that tops the list. But it’s not only that! Doing the dishes and sanitizing the bathroom are right next to never-ending laundry. Among the things that people don’t hate doing nearly as much are organizing and decluttering, taking the trash out, and wiping kitchen surfaces.

Despite hating certain chores, people force themselves to do them nevertheless. A different survey carried out by YouGov found that 51% of respondents clean their kitchen sinks daily, and 27% do the same with their bathroom sinks and their toilets. Among the things that are not cleaned daily are such things like open kitchen shelves and furniture, which are more likely to be tended to weekly. If you’re wondering what items are only remembered every few months, the survey suggests that it’s mostly freezers, refrigerators, kitchen cupboards, and wardrobes.

Sometimes, though, people decide to clean everything all at once. Yes, I am talking about the dreaded spring cleaning. However, data from 2024 shows that whether they enjoy doing it or not, as much as 80% of people were planning to do a spring clean in their homes last year, marking a 10% increase from just three years prior.

For Amanda, spring cleaning this year seemingly entailed tackling her car. Though not everyone on the internet was equally impressed with that—while some people applauded her effort, others believed that the car should have never reached this point in the first place.