Last week I wrote this post after I realized Number 3 was struggling not because he was being a tool but because he needed help and I had failed to pick up on it.
He was losing things and forgetting things and it had been going on for a couple years, and I felt like kind of an asshole for not realizing what was going on.
When I was a teacher, it seemed every other kid in my class had an ADD or ADHD diagnosis.
And I’ll be honest. I don’t believe half the kids actually had legitimate attention issues. I think ADD and ADHD are one of the most overdiagnosed conditions out there. And I believe doctors hand out those labels without thoroughly looking into each child who comes into his or her office looking for an on-demand diagnosis.
But after really thinking about this over the past week, I think it is very likely that Number 3 has ADD.
He struggles so badly with keeping track of his things. He is constantly losing homework and bathing suits and goggles and baseball hats and cups and shoes. When I ask him to empty the dishwasher, it often takes him close to thirty minutes because he gets so distracted he ends up in a different room in the house multiple times before he is done. And when I talked to one of his teachers last week, she told me he didn’t come close to finishing a math test he took. But every answer he had written down was correct. This has happened more than once on a math test or quiz.
Inattention is clearly an issue. And he may very well have ADD.
I could have made an appointment with a therapist and looked for an official diagnosis, but I’m not sure that’s necessary. Not yet, anyway.
And this is not because I’m anti-therapy or therapist.
Anyone who knows me or who has read the blog before knows how much I love a good therapist!
But I did know what I could do to help him immediately, so I took steps to do that last Sunday after realizing there was a significant problem.
First, I had diagnosed a few issues: Number 3 was having trouble keeping track of his stuff, he was wasting time looking for things (which ultimately ended up causing me to waste time looking for things), he was getting frustrated and angry, and he was also having trouble staying focused.
I didn’t do a total life overhaul, but I did make some changes that were manageable for both him and me.
First, I cleaned out the mudroom.
I know for me that the condition of the first room I walk into when I enter the house has a direct affect on me both physically and mentally. When it’s neat I feel like I’ve got some control and order in my life. When it’s a disaster, I literally have a physical reaction. Anxiety. Panic.
It feels terrible.
And I imagined for someone who really has a hard time keeping their shit straight, it must feel even worse.
Last weekend, our mudroom looked like this:
This is typical of how it normally looks. Actually, it’s not as bad as it often gets.
But there were about twenty pairs of shoes in there, probably just as many jackets, and who knows how many hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves strewn all over the place.
So I did something I should have done a long time ago.
I assigned everyone a hook.
Then, I kept one jacket, one pair of shoes, one pair of boots, one hat, one pair of gloves or mittens for snow, one pair of lighter gloves or mittens just for the cold, and a neck warmer or scarf in the mudroom.
The rest was taken out and either put into storage in the basement, up in the kids’ closets, or donated to Good Will.
Then the mudroom looked like this:
and this:
Each kid has two brown baskets. The hats, gloves, mittens, neck warmers and scarves are in them.
With each kid allowed to keep only one of each item in the mudroom, it immediately became much less cluttered and much more manageable.
Before they had four or five pairs of gloves each in those baskets. And what ended up happening was that no one really took care of their things. And some of the kids had four single gloves or mittens but not one matching pair.
But now that there is only one of each thing, the kids are much more motivated to keep track of them.
And it is so much less cluttered.
Same thing with the shoes. Only one pair of shoes and boots per kid immediately freed up a whole bunch of space.
And having an assigned hook for each kid eliminated having to rifle through fourteen jackets before finding theirs.
But this step alone was not enough.
Next, I had to monitor this area.
Every day when the kids came home this week I stood in the mudroom with them and made sure they put everything exactly where it belonged.
Sure, it was a pain in the ass to have to sit there and babysit them.
But the mornings became so much smoother.
Not only could Number 3 easily locate his stuff, all of the kids found their things much more easily.
I think I will realistically need to monitor the mudroom when the kids come home for another couple weeks before it becomes automatic and the kids hang their things on the proper hook without having to even think about it.
But not having the where-is-my-jacket/hat/shoe/bakcpack-freakout multiple times a morning totally did not suck at all.
And walking into a neat and orderly space when you first get home makes a world of difference.
The third thing I did to help Number 3 this week was start waking him up earlier.
As the school year has gone on and we’ve become busier and busier with sports and homework and life in general, I felt bad having to wake up Number 3 in the moring. He’s always so tired. And I started letting him sleep a little later and a little later.
The extra ten or fifteen minutes of sleep wasn’t really helping him.
But the rushing around that resulted from letting him sleep was definitely hurting him.
So I started waking him up fifteen minutes earlier in the morning.
Not only did it give him more time, it also gave us a little extra one-on-one time because Number 2 has already gotten on the bus at that point, and Numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 start school almost an hour after him, so they are still asleep.
This extra time while he was eating breakfast and was not distracted by any noise or any other kids has also given me a few minutes to go over with him what he had to do that day during and after school.
I didn’t tell him I was going to start doing this. I just did it.
And on Thursday Number 3 said to me, “Mom? Have you been waking me up earlier?”
I told him I had.
“It’s helping me,” he told me. “I like it a lot.”
He noticed. And he felt it. And it made a really big difference for him.
Yes.
There are still changes to be made.
But this was a manageable start for both of us, it was extremely effective, and I didn’t need to go see a therapist to do it.
If you have a kid who is struggling the same way Number 3 is, think about these three things. No, you may not have a mudroom, but you have a place where your kids enter the house on a regular basis. You could tackle that area tomorrow and help your son or daughter start the week (and a new month!) off in a much more calm and controlled way.
And then, check back next Saturday when I share three more manageable changes we make this week to help Number 3 be even more focused and organized!
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As a mom that didn’t receive an ADD diagnosis until the age of 36 I have to applaud your the steps you have already taken. Everyone in my house laughs at me because I have a specific place to put my bag and keys when I come in the house. If I didn’t then who knows where they would end up.
I wish that I had known what was “wrong” with me as a kid. I was always losing or forgetting stuff. I was a latch key kid and I lost or forgot my house key so often that my mom had to leave a window unlocked so I would have a way to get in most days. 😉
My #5 is the one who can never find her stuff and get it together in the morning, but she has it together in every other area, just ask her! My #4 keeps track of things well, but never has a clue what is going on around him or what he ought to be doing half the time and struggles with attention at school terribly. I labeled mud room hooks with names recently as well.
Our oldest has very similar issues and I notice a correlation between that and how many video games he plays. I’ve heard that our national attention span has gone down from like 12 seconds to just 8 seconds in the past 15 years and I think you’d find that ADD and ADHD diagnoses have a similar rise. Anyway, we’ve limited the time he gets to play any games at this point and I feel its helped.
This is just my family’s experience with ADHD and anxiety that I want to share, only because I know you’ve mentioned Number 3’s anxiety in the past. I’m totally not trying to diagnose your kid because I hate when people do that.
My son’s 1st grade teacher thought my son had ADHD. We asked his pediatrician and he said he wanted to wait to jump to that conclusion because my son’s birthday barely makes the grade cutoff and he’s probably just a little behind the other kids attention wise. 2nd grade went fine because his teacher adored him and now I know, she largely babied him a lot. His 3rd grade teacher brought up ADHD again, so we went and had him evaluated. I really didn’t think that he had ADHD because he never had an attention problem at home, and his grades were always really high. His standardized tests score were in the 98th percentile and I thought long boring tests were a problem for kids with ADHD. But I’m no expert, so off we went to the child therapist. After 2 sessions, she says that he doesn’t have ADHD, but anxiety. She said that anxiety in children (especially boys) is very often misdiagnosed as ADHD because in the classroom, the inattention, fidgeting, and disorganization looks a lot like ADHD. The problem comes in that ADHD and anxiety are treated in vastly different ways.
So, I just wanted to share this in case Number 3’s organization problems may be due to his anxiety, like my son’s were. Cognitive behavior therapy has worked wonders on him.