Getting Your ADHD Child to Clean Their Room

Cleaning your room is a hated chore in our house.  As I suspect it is in many houses.  However, children with ADHD struggle more with cleaning their rooms than other children because they often have difficulty with focusing on tedious unexciting activities.  So how can you get your child to clean their room and stay on task until the room is actually clean?  And what can you do when your child doesn't actually clean their room?

1)  Choose your battles.  A messy room is really not as big of a deal as failing in reading or even not brushing your teeth.  This is one of those tasks where it is ok to let your child fail and it is ok to turn a blind eye if it isn't perfect.
That being said, there are good things about learning to clean your room.  Safety and hygiene come to mind.  Being able to find things when you need them is also a top priority, especially if you have ADHD.  So there are certain parts about cleaning a room that are less negotiable than others.  In our house, we don't allow food outside of eating areas ever and if the room is dangerously cluttered it must be cleaned.  Also, if you lose something you need, you clean until you find it.

2) Define cleaning.  Cleaning your room can mean shoving everything into the closet and shutting the door.  And that may be good enough if your goal is to vacuum the carpet so no one dies from dust allergies.  However, if you need to find something, cleaning means putting everything back in it's place, finding a place for it if doesn't have one, or deciding to toss it if all of that is too much trouble.  In any case, if you are not clear on the goal, you shouldn't be surprised if you ADHD child cannot read your mind.

3)  Less stuff means less to clean.    You can use toy rotation or exchange schemes to limit the number of toys that are accessible at any given time.  Also, encourage your child to bless other children with toys they no longer use or no longer want to care for.

4)  Have a routine.  If cleaning up is part of the daily or weekly routine, it will be less of a battle.   Your child will know to expect it and eventually will plan on having to do it, so it won't seem like an interruption.

5) Make it less unpleasant.  Play music.  Join in the fun.   Have races against each other or a timer.  Have a reward (different from a bribe--a reward being agreed to before the task is accepted and a bribe being offered once the task is refused). 

6)  Break it down into smaller chunks.  This is something that works for a lot of unpleasant tasks.  You can either break it down in time increments  (clean for 15 minutes as hard as you can and then take a 5 minute break, repeat) or into parts of the task (first pick up the dirty clothes, then pick up the Legos, then toss out extra papers, etc.) or into parts of the room (divide the room into sectors, cover the rest up with blankets, and then clean one sector at a time.

Keeping things neat and orderly probably won't be your child unless they just get in the zone and hyperfocus when they clean (and some people are like that!).  But teaching them that cleaning up their room isn't an impossible task is a worthy goal and probably will help them stay safe and healthy.  So, happy cleaning!