Go Clean Your Room!

Telling Connor to "go clean your room" is an exercise in futility and frustration for both of us. "Clean your room," to me, is pretty self-explanatory. Room is messy. Make it unmessy, i.e. clean.

To Connor, I have just told him to climb Mount Everest with no equipment. For example, have you ever seen the movie A Bug's Life? At the beginning (don't worry, I am not divulging any major plot point here)the ants are dutifully marching in their very orderly line, routinely gathering food for the winter. All of a sudden a leaf falls, covering the path that the ants were following. The ant at the front of the line panics, "I'm lost!" The ant in charge, however, calmly shows the ants that all they need to do is go around the leaf and they will be back on track.

We have come to the point where sometimes I can say "go clean your room" to my own expected results, and he does a perfect job. Other times we have to get creative. Here are some things we have tried. Which one works depends on his mood and anxiety level, but I have had some success with each.

1. We have divided his room into sections to be cleaned. I think this makes more work for him, but he likes it because he has a pattern of things to clean up, as each quadrant will have a list of what needs to be cleaned, and he can see his progress. So far, this has worked best for us.

2. Connor has a beautiful imagination so sometimes we turn cleaning up into a game. Often he is on a secret mission looking for clues and the only way he can get the clue is to put his books on a shelf. This requires either preparation or participation on my part, but it makes cleaning fun. Other times we make it a scavenger hunt or tell him to pick up 4 red things, then seven small things, etc.

3. Other times, we say clean up for fifteen minutes, then he can have a break for fifteen minutes. This is good because he can see the time, knows there is an endpoint and a reward at a specific time coming up. One time he decided to clean for thirty so he could have a thirty minute break. This has also worked well for us, and is good with homework too!

Feel free to share what works for your family. Every Aspie is different and has different motivators, so what has worked for us may throw yours into a meltdown. The trick is to be patient and willing to try new things when you need to. When a leaf falls in your path, go around.