To tidy dd's bedroom?

[lemisscared]

it was an utter pigsty, beyond what she could have managed and not really her fault. I managed to empty a big storage box for all (err some) of her cuddly toys.

i am now sitting here putting off the school run as she is going to have a meltdown.

She is obsessed with some of her toys. She calls them "the guys" and she carts them all down every morning before school then takes them back and covers them up. She worries about them during the day and tells me not to go into her room

She has got so much stuff that even the spare room is full of it but we battle to throw anything away. i do it surreptitiously but it botes me in the arse sometimes.

fp says i should leave it as she likes it that way but i need to at least try to keep it clean. honestly it looked like a room social services would have had me up for neglect this morning

now it looks lovely and all her things are nicely arranged but it is going to be like armegeddon when she gets in.

she is a very young 9 btw.

how can i stop this almost ocd type behaviour from getting more in grained? dp says "its just what kids are like" im not so sure.

I'd maybe get her assessed. It sounds like it could be anxiety related. Hoarders at the root of it are anxiety based.

I do know that catering to anxiety only "proves" to the brain that there was indeed something to fear. Not saying throw all her crap out, but talk to a doctor, see what they say. See if they can give you some steps to clearing out the junk.

If it's not anxiety related, then it's time to put your foot down as a parent. She either keeps it clean, or it gets thrown out. My parents did that for me, and believe me after all the junk was gone I had a much easier time maintaining my room.

Either way, you need to get rid of some of that stuff to make it manageable for her to keep up herself. She can't just live in squalor like that.

DD is not the tidiest person and sometimes finds her room overwhelming because she doesn't know where to start. We have had some success with setting a timer for 5 minutes and she knows she only has to spend that amount of time tidying. Needs to be done fairly often though.

Institute a new rule that room must be tidied once a week on Saturday mornings, or whenever. (Or at the end of each day).
Also another new rule - no new toys until some existing ones are given away. Fine if she wants to keep them all, but then nothing new.

(ps Sometimes aspergers in girls goes unrecognised as they are better socially than boys but can have obsessive behaviours)

Bulbasaur i had a horrible feeling someone was going to say that. I suffer from anxiety and am on medication. I don't remember being like that as a child. Home life is fairly stable and everyone comments on how happy dd is. Not really sure that medical intervention is something id want to do just now. The SENCO at school is aware as dd is dyslexic and ive spoken to them about what i consider to be ocd type behaviour.

The meltdown wasn't quite as bad at i feared and would have been averted had i not tidied away one of her more precious "guys". Thankfully he was found quickly and she has accepted the changes. She is now happy playing in her room with her collection of rubbers!

Does she perhaps get anxious about you unexpectedly tidying in her room and going near her especially beloved toys without her there to look after them because in the past you have thrown away some of her things in secret?

I have dsycalculia, which is similar to dyslexia in many ways. I have a theory that perhaps she is getting upset because when things are a mess she knows where it is. I have a bunch of organized messes in my house. When things are clean I have a hard time locating things, DH jokingly calls it change blindness, but if something isn't where it's suppose to be or where I expect it, I have a hard time finding it because my brains doesn't rapid process objects and find things like it should. I see the object but it doesn't always process in my brain that it's there. My brain is a bit funny like that.

If the anxiety is caused by this, then getting rid of stuff will actually help in the long run. Get some fun organizer bins/baskets so that it's easy to maintain and let her figure out how she sorts it so that she can always find things when she needs to.

Messes are very easy to get over whelming if you have a LD. If dishes stack up too high for me, my brain shuts down and DH has to start them he kindly just does them all to get the kitchen "reset" so I have an easy time maintaining it again. Can you give her a step by step list? 1. Pick up clothes, 2. Put buddies where they belong, etc... So she has small incremental steps to follow.

worth a try with the list. i did tell her after she told me i had ruined her life that if she tidied herself i wouldn't have to interfere.