How Organizing With Your Child Can Help Build Independence
Whether your child is five years old and constantly asking you for snacks or you have a teenager who needs frequent reminders to get ready for their activities, your life would be easier if your child could develop some independence.
But you feel like if you stopped giving reminders, everything would fall apart. How would your middle schooler remember their cleats? Would your 3rd grader even eat lunch?
The problem is, without practice your child won’t get the chance to develop these skills and will struggle once tasks become too difficult in middle school and beyond. If they are accustomed to having someone else (like you, their parent) do the first steps for them and give reminders for each and every step, then your child/teenager will have difficulty with bigger tasks that involve many steps like writing an essay, studying for a test, and presenting to their class.
Building up a student’s confidence using skills and doing tasks independently takes a lot of work. Many children and teenagers who struggle with reading, writing, planning, and organizing need individualized help like speech-language therapy to help them learn skills and develop independence.
But help isn’t only possible in a speech therapy session! There are many ways that you can support your child outside of what we do in our speech sessions to help them practice their ability to plan, organize, prioritize, and manage their time, aka their executive functions. To better understand what I mean by executive functions, please read my blog posts about what executive functioning is and some different profiles of people who struggle with executive functioning to see if they sound familiar to you.
In this post, I’m going to talk about ways that we can help children and teenagers get and stay organized by helping them visualize what done looks like.
Imagining What “Done” Looks Like
If you are sick of picking up after your teenager, annoyed by finding lost items for your middle schooler, or struggle to keep organized yourself, you will probably love this tool.
Many children, teenagers, and adults who struggle with executive functioning have difficulty understanding what “done” will look like. They can’t forecast themselves into the future, visualizing what it will look like, feel like once they complete a particular task. Since they can’t imagine what done would look like, they have difficulty intuiting the steps they need to take in order to finish a task.
Take your teenager with a messy room as an example. They are probably not being “lazy.” They might actually be struggling to imagine what a “clean room” would even look like! They might have an idea of what your version of a clean room looks like (but they also might not!) but they don’t know what their version would look like, with their stuff and their needs. Shaming them about how their room is such a mess will probably not help, but talking them through what their room could look like might.
Guiding Your Child/Teen: How do they use their room? What activities happen there?
To develop an organizational system that works for them, you will both first need to discuss their priorities for the room.
What activities do they need to do there?
They probably need to sleep in their room and get dressed in their room but they might also need to do homework, study for tests, put on make-up, and read.
What activities do they want to do there?
Beyond the basics of what they need to do in their room, what else do they want to do in their room? This is where you might get some buy-in. Do they want to play with friends in their room so they have some more privacy but there isn’t space when all their clothes are on the floor?
Help your child brainstorm all of the activities they do in their room. As always, try not to force your ideas onto them; you want them to be independent - not your clone! The activities that want and need to do in their room will help you both think about what organizational system could be sustainable and can help you create “zones” for the different types of activities.
Let’s say your child uses their room for sleeping, homework, getting dressed, and building lego sets. Ask your child/teen where they imagine doing each activity.
Sleeping zone- Easy! In my bed!
Homework zone - At my table or my desk
Dressing zone- A space near the closet, dresser, and/or hamper
Building lego sets zone- a table or spot on the floor to build, a bin to put extra pieces, and maybe a shelf for 1-3 finished lego builds
When you are talking this through, make sure your child is making decisions, not just you. There will be more buy-in to the organizational “system” you develop together if they are running the show. It also lets them practice developing a system from scratch with you as a guide.
What other stuff is in their room?
Is there other stuff that needs to be organized in your child’s room? Books? Toys? Clothes? Think together about which activity “zone” their items belong to. Are they reading right before they fall asleep? Maybe they can put their books in a bookcase by their bed. Putting on make-up after getting dressed? Maybe put make-up on top of the dresser. If items are in a “zone” that makes sense, they are less likely to be moved and get lost somewhere else.
Now Time to Put Everything in its “Zone”
Once your child has an idea of what their room could look like, it’s time for them to move everything into the right zone. Hopefully, the layout of their room already makes sense so they won’t have to move too many things. You can put sticky-notes on different areas of the room with the name of each “zone” to help your child match where each item goes.
Is your child struggling with this part? You can give them reminders like:
Hmm, you mentioned that you needed space to do homework and study. Do you think you should keep your legos on top of your desk? What will happen if you have a half-finished lego project on the desk but you need to do homework. Ah-ha! You’re right. Maybe you can find another spot for your legos.
Don’t Forget to Take Pictures
Now here is where the magic happens…
When everything looks nice and organized, TAKE A PICTURE!
Don’t just take one picture of the room, take a bunch. Take a picture of each “zone” that you established. Print those pictures out and paste them in the room or put them in an envelope labeled “Cleaning-what done looks like.” Now, when your child needs to clean their room, they will actually have an image to compare to. You can even take pictures of the steps they need to take to clean their room (take out plates and glasses, hang up clothing, etc). If they don’t know where to start, you can help them by looking at the pictures together.
Hmmm, I see that there is clothing on the floor over there. In the pictures, we see that dirty clothes are in a hamper here and clean clothes are here and here.
Oh, some lego pieces are on your dresser. Where does it look like lego pieces are in your picture? Yeah! The lego bin!
Make Organizing a Habit
Being organized is a process, not an end result, so your child will need to practice organizing regularly. This is great because your child needs lots of practice in order to develop independence.
How often should your child organize? Depends! Do you think it would be easier if they organized every day? Every week? The best way for them to develop the habit is for you to model it for them. Want them to organize every day? Have a home-wide organizing event for a half-hour after dinner every night. If you model it every day, it will be easier for them to practice. Think once a week would be best? Have a tidy hour every Sunday evening before a shared dessert. You aren’t tidying their room together. You are all tidying your whole apartment or home and they are responsible for their room.
Does that seem like too high of a bar? Does your child in elementary school need a little more guidance? Select just one “zone” in their room or a shared room for them to clean/tidy/organize. They could put all of their toys in their respective homes. For inspiration, think about the bins you would find in a kindergarten classroom. Your child might benefit from pictures or labels on the outside of the box, drawer, or bin like a school classroom might have.
Seems like a lot of work. Why do I care about this again?
You want your child or teenager to be independent. You want to stop being asked where every lost item is. You don’t want all of your cups to be missing every single day. You want your child or teenager to have the executive functioning skills, like organizing, that they need to be successful in reading, writing, studying, and so much more.
Hi, I’m Hollis, the owner of Mindful Speech.
I’m a speech-language pathologist licensed in Illinois and Colorado.
I specialize in providing speech therapy to help children, teens, and young adults to improve language, reading, writing, and executive functioning skills. Now offering in-person sessions in Chicago!
Learn more about me on my About Hollis page.