The main visible difference between a child’s bedroom and an adult’s bedroom is that kids leave stuff strewn all over the floor. Adults have stepped on enough LEGO and other small toys that we prefer an open field. We appreciate the luxury of walking barefoot across a room without getting punctured by a tiny plastic accessory. Children use these items to mark their territory, assert their aesthetics, avoid boring chores, and also because they don’t know how to do otherwise.
“The floor is lava” is a game we used to play as kids. It’s the sort of thing one child teaches another, like all the rude little verses we call back. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” The point of “the floor is lava” is that you have to jump around on the furniture, and if you touch the floor, then you fell in the hot lava. It’s a really exciting excuse to hop on the couch. One of the reasons kids will tolerate having stuff all over the floor is that they are nimble enough they don’t really need a floor at all. In a narrow enough hallway, they’ll crawl up the walls. Another reason kids tolerate having a messy floor is that they have a lot of really small toys. This is a function of culture, of what’s available to buy and own. It’s also a problem created almost entirely by adults. Kids don’t have any money and they can’t drive. All of their stuff, their messy messy stuff, came from THE PARENTS and their ilk. Yes, kids will bring home pebbles and pine cones, but it’s a duty of parenting to explain why that stuff belongs in the natural world and why it isn’t fun to step on stuff barefoot in the dark. It’s also up to the parents to be a filter between affordable materialism and a livable space in the home. If you don’t want your kids to make a mess, quit bringing them tiny toys. Set boundaries with the grandparents. Sit down with them and sort and purge a few times a year. Teach them what the heck is meant by the mysterious directive, “Clean your room.” What children have in common with my people, the adult chronically disorganized folks of the world, is that they all struggle with categorizing things. Sorting and grouping is challenging for them. They don’t know what to do or how to do it. They have no idea what ‘done’ looks like. This is something they can learn, but not something they can ever be expected to figure out on their own. That’s where an organizer like me comes in. I understand that they have all the creativity, intelligence, and desire to please that they could ever need. All they need is someone to patiently walk them through how to sort things into categories, many times, many times, until they start to understand. They also start to be supported by a visible, clearly marked system. The room itself starts to show what to do and how to do it. My people tend to have stuff on their floors, just like little kids do, because of a series of reasons. They don’t see it - especially in the bathrooms, where most people with vision problems are not wearing their glasses or contact lenses. They aren’t looking for it, because “bare floors” is not a metric in their world. There may be a lot of boxes and large furniture and stacks and piles obscuring the small objects that have fallen to the floor. They may have cats or other pets who climb and jump and knock things to the floor and carry things off in their naughty mouths. They may have physical issues, like knee or back pain, that prevent them from bending or kneeling. They may simply be struggling with depression. Mostly, though, they’ve just reached adulthood without anyone teaching them the painstaking process of categorizing the small items. Since the floor is always scattered with small objects, it never gets vacuumed. Because it never gets vacuumed, cleaning the floors is never a task on the schedule. Because cleaning the floors is never on the timeline, every object that hits the floor stays there. This is how the problem compounds over time. My people tend to be bright and creative, yet also pessimistic and prone to fatalism. Their reaction to stress and drama is not “time to do something about this” but rather “oh well, oh dang, not again, why me.” My people tend to catastrophize and make problems seem worse than they are because they believe they are powerless. This mindset is compounded by the chaos in their physical surroundings. They are unskilled at estimating how long it takes to do things. They often see chores and other aversive tasks, like financial planning, cooking, or exercising, as moral issues or personal failings or character flaws rather than simple practical jobs to be done. They’ll cling to the same housekeeping techniques their grandparents used. In their minds, “cleaning” or “housework” takes days, it’s physically exhausting, it’s incredibly boring and humiliating, and it must be done alone, in deep silence. (When I was a kid, housework meant we had company coming later in the day, and that meant party food. It wasn’t that we liked dusting or cleaning our rooms, it was that we knew the clock was ticking toward chips ‘n’ dip or pizza and movie time). Another way to look at it is that tiny toys and other objects don’t need to be picked up one by one, while crawling on your hands and knees. There are three fast and easy ways to do it, if you do it yourself. One is to stand up and use the top edge of a mop to scrape all the stuff into a pile. (You can also buy an object called a “toy rake” to do this job). Another way is to kneel on the floor with a magazine or a child’s board book in each hand. Use the bindings as scraper tools, like windshield wipers, and scoop all the tiny toys toward you. The third way is to buy a robot vacuum and let it pick up the tiny toys in its ashtray, so you can shake them out afterward. With kids involved, you can set a timer and make toy pickup into a game. It’s also important to have a sorting system that is clear and obvious, a system they can reach and that they are old enough to easily understand. Praise the behaviors you want, reward the results that you like on a regular schedule, support the system so it continues to work, but understand that punishment, lectures, and blame are demotivating for children and exhausting for you. With a bare floor, you can do a lot. You can dance around and do the Sound of Music twirl. You can play and wrestle with your pets and your kids. You can get down and relax with some yoga stretches. You can pace back and forth. You can stumble around at night without hurting your foot in the dark. If you drop an earring or an aspirin, you can spot it and pick it up. A bare floor is an asset, something that it’s easy to take for granted. If the floor is lava at your house, start imagining how you can start walking on it again. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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