How This #MomwithADHD Taught her Kids HOW to Clean Their Rooms
How does an ADHD Mom who sucks at cleaning teach her children how to keep their rooms clean...
In case you are new to my substack blog or you missed this popular post the first time around, I have unlocked it for two weeks so that my FREE Subscribers have access too! But wait there’s more…
I’m also unlocking the follow up piece, yeah! Check it out at the end of the blog.
Thank you to Amazon for indulging the positive side of my impulsive behavior. I love small businesses, I LOVVVVEEE small business owners, ie “yours truly”. However, Amazon gets me, like truly, deeply. It knows that sometimes I need three different types of kitchen size, strong (meaning they can be dragged down the stairs and not tear) garbage bags at my house same day. It’s not a want, it’s a need.
The following is a story deeply rooted in ADHD, living my life being “type Q” rather than type A and trying to raise kids who have skills to work around the inevitable genetic executive dysfunction I have passed down.
Our master bedroom is on the main floor. Raising two teens and a tween, and no longer needing to race upstairs to feed, diaper, or comfort a screaming child in the middle of the night this serves us quite well. I’ve broken my foot twice and torn a tendon once as well since we moved into this house, so luckily I don’t need to do the stairs to go to bed!
The problem I am currently experiencing is the fact that I not only avoid stairs when I have broken my foot, but I also avoid the UPSTAIRS, ie my 3 kids’ bedrooms and the two huge hall closets all of the time. You see most days, “out of sight out of mind” has worked well for me. If I don’t see how messy their rooms are, I’m not thinking about how messy their rooms are. I don’t have to feel angry, annoyed, or overwhelmed about how messy their rooms are. In addition, we have these strangely huge closets in the upstairs hallway that don’t have much shelving. They are a great place to stash the clean laundry I have managed to wash, but not sort until someone gets sick of dirty clothes and goes in there to find their clean underwear. On the rare occasion I do end upstairs I will see a pile, taller than my youngest child of clothing no one in my home will claim and therefore no one will put away on the floor of these closets. So I just avoid the upstairs, problem solved.
I am so helpless with cleaning, that I pay a lovely couple to clean my home every other week. They do the tasks I really hate, like vacuuming, dusting, cleaning toilets, changing sheets, and mopping floors. It’s an expense I can’t quite afford, yet I also can’t afford NOT to pay for… Get it? In simple terms, if it wasn’t for the professional cleaning service I hire, these tasks would hardly ever get done.
Do you struggle to keep your house “presentable and livable?” I’m not talking about “pottery barn catalog” perfection, just clean and organized enough to find what you need and have people over on occasion. The struggle is real and I’ve lived it. Cleaning and organizing can feel impossible when you have ADHD. We are not born Type A, we are Type ADHD. Check out my new service just for you!
Paying for the cleaning service and avoiding the upstairs has been a foolproof plan until last week. I wasn’t home when the cleaners finished. I got a text later that day requesting an additional fee because the kids’ rooms were not picked up enough to vacuum, necessitating extra time for the crew to finish their tasks. I was a bit confused because my husband (also not a type A, neat person) checked their rooms and said they had cleaned them. I bravely went upstairs to check out the situation with my own eyes and realized their rooms were insanely cluttered. They had piles in every corner, they had garbage on surfaces. They had a bunch of little messes, that had likely been there so long that they didn’t notice them anymore. I understood how this happened. I sometimes will have an empty vase or some bottles I meant to recycle cluttering up my counter for so many weeks that they start to blend into the backsplash and I just clean up around them.
I felt many things in this moment:
I was embarrassed that the cleaning crew had to see my failure to “keep house.” Yes, I have accepted this about myself, I’m even sharing it with all of you here. However RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) sometimes jumps in and takes over, and there was still shame in not being able to keep my house clean.
I was also mortified that we gave the cleaning crew extra work. Yes, I paid for their time, but I didn’t like the fact that we had put them in that position. It felt disrespectful of what their role was and what tasks were our responsibility.
I was angry and annoyed at my kids for not cleaning their rooms well. Yes, I knew they likely didn’t know how (remember the counter clutter I sometimes failed to see) but still I was just annoyed because I’m human. I am proud, however, that I processed this before I spoke to them!
Lastly, this inspired me to creatively problem-solve and try something new. Hence the impulsive shopping for garbage bags on Amazon.
Can’t handle a cliffhanger, I get it. Check out my follow up piece here, including a free preview for those who aren’t paid subscribers.
Enjoying this blog? Support my writing by sharing it with a friend.
You can support me further by becoming a paid subscriber. Free subscribers get access to all of my writing and newsletters for 30 days. Paid subscribers get unlimited access to all of the archives! Years of content and free resources.
I realized that the kids probably have too much of everything in their room to easily organize and clean. It was time for a purge. I knew this was likely to take a few days or longer and in the past the bags would get confused between- giveaway items and trash. Therefore I picked out three different color bags.
The white ones would be for giveaway clothes, toys, and accessories they no longer needed or wanted.
The black would be for trash, ie broken toys, pieces to games that no longer existed and who knows what else…
The greenish would be for recycling all of those random pieces of paper, clothing tags, boxes, and other things strewn about.
Now, I was thrilled when I came up with this color-coordinated, genius plan. It was creative, it was strategic, it would give me great blog content… I have lived with these three for several years now and was once a tween and teen myself. Therefore I knew better than to expect the kids to be excited about cleaning their rooms, no matter how groundbreaking my new color-coded trash bag strategy was. So I thought, what do all of my kids love and always want more of? Money!! I told each child separately (this was most efficient, due to dance class, forensics rehearsal, and ski team practice…) what happened with the cleaning service emphasizing how I couldn’t continue to pay extra money and that this wasn’t respectful of their time. Then I shared my strategy with the colored-coded trash bags AND that I would pay them $1 per bag brought downstairs.
Amazingly enough, no one whined about this plan or my request to do a deeper cleaning of their room. I think this has to do with a few things:
I motivated them with money
I gave them a clear strategy to do a big job, ie filling up each bag
I also told them they have a week to accomplish this, and suggested they do a little each day
So this ends this segment of, “my love affair with Amazon.” Did the color-coded garbage bag genius work? Well, I don’t know yet. They have until Monday to complete the task. I’ll keep you updated!
If someone forwarded this blog to you, make sure to subscribe so you can see what happens next!
What is your prediction? Will it work? Would it work in your home? How do you help your kids really understand how to keep a clean and organized room? Comment below!
Want more ADHD content? Check out my ADHD Awareness Blog roundup.
Want to laugh with me about #ADHDlife? Check out one of my most popular Instagram Reels.
More of a Tik Tok user? Check out a popular Tik Tok post all about my nemesis- the laundry!
Want personalized organizational help now? Book a personal Type ADHD Consultation now!