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Helping the DIsorganized Child
April 29, 2010 by Evelyn Kashinsky
Posted in•Social Thinking•Study Skills/Organization•A Parents View
I am constantly reading books that I think might help my children. The latest one that I picked up was ‘Organizing the Disorganized Child’ by Martin L. Kutscher and Marcella Moran. My daughter is completely disorganized.
She doesn’t know how to put things away. You can’t walk into her room because the floor is littered. She doesn’t remember the books she needs for homework. Her handwriting is atrocious and I can barely read it. She is always telling me items she needs for a project that’s due tomorrow…. at 8 pm at night the night before. My getting frustrated with her doesn’t help. “How could you forget that?” “Why do you always wait until the last minute?” She tells me it’s her teacher’s fault, her friend’s fault, anyone’s fault…but not her fault.
What is going on here?
As the book so aptly says, laying blame is only useful if it will help you fix the problem. In this case it is not my daughter who is to blame but rather her underdeveloped frontal lobes. This is what is called an executive function disorder. One of the issues here is guilt. One of the reasons that she constantly blames someone else is that she does not want to feel guilty. Guilt is a motivator until it becomes so overwhelming that it causes us to decide that we cannot be at fault. Who wants to feel bad about themselves all the time? This is where I have been making some headway. Let me repeat…those statements do not help her. It causes her to blame someone else because she doesn’t want me to be angry or upset with her. But the bottom line is that I really only want to help her. So I decided to take the blame out of it.
Last week she did the wrong homework for one of her classes. She told me that the teacher might call to discuss it. This was not laziness. She did the work. There is an organizational, planning step she is just not getting (hence my picking up the book). It’s not that I haven’t shown her how to get organized. I have bought her agenda books. If I asked her she would be able to tell me how to use it. I needed to help her learn to be responsible for her own actions and not to feel guilty about it.
So I calmly discussed the situation with her. We analyzed what happened. I let her know that it wasn’t her friend’s fault that she handed in the wrong homework; it was her responsibility, therefore her problem. She started to get agitated. I went on to tell her that I wasn’t angry, and that this must be causing her a tremendous amount of anxiety. Ultimately she needed to find a solution to this problem, and I was very willing to help her. She did agree that it wasn’t her friend’s fault, that yes it was her responsibility. Why do I think this was such an important step, this accepting of responsibility? Well like anyone of us, when we think someone has misguided us and we do the wrong thing because of that misguidance, we tend to get angry at that person. So yes, my daughter was angry with her friend, and she was letting it show. This, not surprisingly, was wearing on the friendship. And this wasn’t the first time. Her friends, though happy to help, were getting annoyed at her for depending on them and therefore making them responsible for her failures. She was starting to lose friendships.
So Step 1 in helping her to get organized was having her realize that there was a problem. Step 2 was helping her realize that there wasn’t any reason to feel bad or guilty about it. Just like some people are great athletes, or math whizzes, some people are great organizers…. or, I should say, have great executive function skills. I reminded my daughter that she was very creative, and had a great ability to make people laugh and feel good, and had great reasoning skills. Not everyone has these. I reminded her that there were many things I couldn’t do without a considerable amount of effort on my part.
And the result is that we are coming up with strategies to help her get organized. First she needed to recognize that there was a problem, and to have no guilt associated with it. Now we are just looking for tools to help her over this hurdle.
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