Parenting When Your Child is Overwhelmed
We’ve all experienced it. We’ve all opened the door to our child’s room and wondered exactly how many unreported earthquakes must’ve occurred to make such a mess possible. (Confession: the picture for this post is my son’s room as it currently looks…) Now the room needs to be cleaned and although sometimes it may be tempting to just clean it ourselves (for our sanity’s sake!), this doesn’t teach the child about their responsibility to pick up after themselves. So, we tell them that they need to clean that nasty room until it’s spotless and everything is put in its place. Then the tears start. Or the tantrum. Or possibly the eternal procrastination. Maybe all three!
Aside from just plain not wanting to clean their room, your child may be overwhelmed by the task. They may not even know where to start to clean up the landfill they have created. This is where we, as parents, can help.
One of the easiest ways to overcome overwhelm is to break the job into smaller, more concrete and manageable parts. Below are a few examples of how this might look
Help your child make a list of each part of the cleaning process. For example: pick up toys, put laundry in hamper, throw trash away, make bed, etc. Sometimes just breaking it down like this and then asking the child to do one of the tasks at a time will be enough to get them started. Being told to put laundry in the hamper is a much less daunting-sounding task than cleaning a whole room. Once one of the items is done, check it off the list and move to the next. Pro tip: Be sure to PRAISE your child at each step! I know you’re (understandably) salty with them for making their room a mess, but the focus right now is getting it cleaned and praise is going to go a long way for the vast majority of kids.
If the list alone isn’t getting you the results you want, you can try to add a bit of fun to it. One example of this is have your child roll dice and clean up the number of items they roll, and then return to repeat the process until the room is clean. Again, between turns, praise is key, as well as maybe throwing in some good old parenting tricks like ‘I’ll time you and see how quickly you can do it!"‘
For older kids, an idea would be to break the room up into different sections. Have your child imagine the room is broken into 4 quadrants. Assign them to clean one quadrant and then give them a short break, snack, etc. before they return to clean the next quadrant. Pro tip: Make sure you put a time limit on the break or else they’ll just never come back and you’ll have a room that is 25% clean and 75% teenage wasteland.
These ideas can work for all sorts of tasks that may overwhelm your kids. Fun fact? They work for adults too! I have used the quadrant technique on my to-do list. I broke it up into fourths, completed a fourth, and then mindlessly scrolled on Facebook for ten minutes before moving on to the next quadrant. Breaking tasks, to-do lists, etc. into pieces truly does make them seem less overwhelming.
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