As one of good my friends says repeatedly, and this is one of the reasons I keep him as a good friend, “we in the neat community don’t appreciate the term neat freak because we find it offensive.” Both my friend and I love being part of this community. So, as a person who prefers to have a little order in my life, you can imagine my glee when I received a link to this Slate article in my inbox yesterday: Messy house, messy mind.

Warning: For those of you who hate reading recent studies that make grand sweeping conclusions that might implicate your fine self and cause you to argue with their dubious results, the rest of this post might irritate you. You might even want to stop reading now. I personally find those kinds of articles great food for thought, and don’t have a problem trying things on for size and then taking them off and letting them land on the floor.

When I first saw this article about the connection between reading and an orderly home, I pictured myself printing it out and posting it on my refrigerator for all—that includes husband, mother in law, and all those on the neat-challenged spectrum who enter my house—to read. Though the content was slightly inconclusive, the headline was a delicious finger pointer that a clean person like me couldn’t resist. Sort of an “I told you so!,” but expertly written by someone else so that I didn’t have to look like a bully with a neat agenda.

The article, at least I thought this as I started to read it, vaguely covers one of the subjects you will hear my husband and raising our voices over the most: keeping things neat and orderly in our house. Before I risk coming off as one of those anal types, I should say that I just need a little neat and clean in my life—ok, a lot—for my mental health. As I am fond of saying, I have a lot of internal chaos, and so I require a fair amount of external order to combat it. And, to make matters more complicated, I married, just as my own mother did, someone who is on the very high end of that spectrum I mentioned. In other words, he is not so interested in being part of the neat community. In fact, not at all.

It’s true that you might also be able to add this Slate article to that collection of wacky fear-inducing parenting articles I tend to be forever on the receiving list of (got it from another mom in my white, well-educated, progressive preschool sphere). But, of course, I had to read it. I had to find out there is, it appears, a connection between good reading skills and an orderly home, that is between high-reading moms and their orderly or not so orderly homes. I needed more people on my side.

According to this writer’s research, her’s is an article about the book Order in the House! Associations among Household Chaos, the Home Literacy Environment, Maternal Reading Ability, and Children’s Early Reading (so yes, I am two times removed here) by several writers from Columbia’s Teachers College, there is a new set of research about how we as parents set the tone for our kids functionality in the world (before you say duh, see the rest of the article). It’s not about how much we read to them, it’s how much we have our shite together. More to feel guilty about, indeed. Unless you are one of those perfect parents, which you might be.

Here’s the quick academic view of the book’s findings:

Results suggest that the degree of household order is significantly and positively associated with expressive vocabulary, reading tests, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers are above-average readers. By contrast, the number of books a child owns or brings home and how often a child amuses herself alone with books are significantly associated with the expressive vocabulary, reading tests, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers are average-ability readers. These results suggest the potential for new approaches to encouraging literacy development in the home beyond those that depend solely on parental literacy.

What does this mean? According to my findings, this means, and it took me a while to get this from the article (written about the book), that how much order there is in the house of the above-average readers, determines how well that child might read. The funny thing is, as much as I wanted this to be an incentive, you know, "we have to keep the house clean because it means our child will read better," it’s not really.

What’s being said is that the more there is an orderly routine in the house, consistent rules, bedtimes, boundaries, etc., the better the children of those households fare, that is in the area of literacy. This is interesting, at least in part to me, because for awhile now I’ve had that other idea in my head. The idea that all I had to do was surround my child with books and they would love reading. I think I got it from Malcolm Gladwell or possibly even from another one of those renegade writers who like to prove that everything you think is right is actually wrong.

Here’s my favorite part about why orderliness is good for reading. It has to do with something called “executive functioning,” something that I, with or without my neatness, could probably stand to have a little more of.

“Household order taps a more fundamental characteristic of parents or households, such as maternal industriousness, planning ability, or conscientiousness, that gives rise to both orderliness and better reading skills in children. This is the idea of executive functioning, which captures planning and problem-solving abilities."

So what it boils down to is, if you want to encourage sharper minds, you have to value order and routine in the house. Not so bad, right? I can still use this against my husband when he leaves all the cooking utensils lying uncleaned around the kitchen, right? Or when he throwns his clothes into a mysterious pile on the floor—are they clean, are they dirty, are they meant to go to the Salvation Army?

Chances are since her parents are both avid readers and writers, I don’t have to worry about my daughter being a good reader. And, realistically, I don’t. She already has more books than we can shelve. In fact, when I draw a mental picture of her room, I realize that a lot of her books, overflow fromthe shleves, are in tall piles on the floor. That might not be so good, according to this research. Unless the piles are neat, I suppose.

But, I do love it when there is scientific evidence to support something that I complain about daily. So, I’m still going to go ahead and post on the article on my refrigerator. You never know, someone might read it. And I could come home to a cleaner house one day.

Though, I doubt it.

One final note: Last night, as I, for the first time ever in her four years of life, let my daughter fall asleep next to me watching American Idol, way after her usual bedtime, because I was tired from long trip and wanting just to sit in front of the TV and watch people sing and be judged, I started to feel a little trickle of guilt knowing that we were creating inconsistency for the sole sake of mom’s exhaustion, but I stopped myself. Perhaps those 15 minutes of American Idol ruined her, but we hadn’t been in the house for days, and it was so clean and neat and, well, my parents let me stay up past my bedtime watching TV once in awhile and I turned out OK. Sort of.