If you have ADHD, this may sound familiar. Something urgent forces you to clean the house, so you plan a Saturday morning reset and you feel highly motivated. But somehow, by the end of the day, you’re sitting in a pile of random junk, with a bigger mess strewn around the house than when you started.
I started seeing the same thing in my children. When they were supposed to be cleaning, they went on cleaning side quests: organizing their Pokémon cards, going through junk drawers. None of it moved us toward the goal of resetting the house, and the mess got bigger, which is exactly how overwhelm starts.
The missing language behind the mess
Why it happens: Working with neurodivergent children, I’ve noticed there’s often a gap in their internal language that needs support. Cleaning takes executive function skills. You need a picture in your mind of how the space should look when you’re done. You need a plan for getting there. And you need a sense of how long it will take.
With my family, one of the gaps was in planning. They lacked the internal vocabulary for what cleaning actually includes. If I asked, “What are you going to do?”, the answer was “clean the house.” That’s technically correct, but it’s too broad to act on. What I was really asking was, “Which parts of the cleaning are you doing?” So I spent time giving them the vocabulary of daily cleaning, room by room: make your bed, wipe the counters, and so on. (More on how to teach this in a later post.)
The fix: The idea of separating tasks from projects comes from one of my all-time favorite books, Getting Things Done by David Allen. A task is a one-off action, like wiping the counter or making the bed. A project is anything that takes more than one step. Pulling out all your Pokémon cards, cleaning out the storage for them, alphabetizing them, and putting them back is a project. Projects are worth doing, but they aren’t the job in front of us during a cleaning reset.
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Teaching the phrase in the moment
Because I’m a speech-language pathologist, I used the side quests themselves as teaching moments. Just like you say “jumping” while a toddler is jumping to teach them the word, I labeled what my kids were doing as it happened. The phrase I used was: “That’s a project. Let’s get back to cleaning.”
At first I got confused stares, the kind that look like processing. This went on for a while. Then they started to catch it themselves. Recently my daughter stopped me and said, “I think we should wait on that, because that’s a project.” I was beyond proud!
Try this week: The next time you notice a side quest in the middle of a chore, name it in a calm voice: “That’s a project. Let’s get back to cleaning.” Then make time for projects later. I set aside time for projects around the house, and often my kids remember to go back to them on their own when that time comes.
So here’s what I keep coming back to: our growing children are a lot like those toddlers. They may still be developing the language that will become their internal voice as they get older.
this is what has worked in my family, not individualized advice for your child
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