This is very long, in an attempt not to drip feed. There’s a 1 line summary at the end if you can’t manage all this!
DD (age 9) is seeing a counsellor through CAMHS. She doesn’t have any kind of label or diagnosis. She was referred for difficulties with socialising (no friends) & low level disruption in class. I don’t know if they think she is depressed, anxious, or what.
There is a different problem at home which I’m wondering whether to bring to the attention of the counsellor. And just how to deal with in general.
She is very messy. This, in itself, I think it probably normal. But she will often shove things in inappropriate places rather than put them away neatly. So I’ll find clean laundry balled up and shoved under the bed, for example. She also does this with dirty laundry – I often find dirty underwear (not particularly soiled, just worn) behind a bookcase, under an armchair etc. All in her own room, not around the house. I can’t understand why she would do this. Surely it’s no more difficult to put things in a laundry basket than it is to squirrel them away somewhere inappropriate. And it’s not constant: she does put some underwear in the laundry basket. There are also loads of stationery, food wrappers (even though she’s not allowed to eat upstairs so she’s hiding this), clothes hangers, and general rubbish hidden in all these places. There are quite a lot of these hiding places so sometimes I don’t find things for a while, it’s quite disgusting.
I’ve tried talking to her about it several times. Every week I’ll find at least one stash. Today it took three hours to tidy her room while looking for her lost homework book even though the room had been ostensibly tidy-ish before we began. It was chocked full of things shoved into wrong places. She has no idea why she does it.
I used to think it was just laziness. That she found it easier than putting things in their proper place. But it really isn’t true that it would take any longer to put a pen in a drawer than to deliberately hide it under a mattress, and she’s old enough to understand this, so I don’t get it from that point of view at all.
I wonder if it’s some sort of compulsive behaviour, but I’ve got no real idea.
Her dad, my ex-h, is very messy too and never cleans the house. But he doesn’t deliberately hide things, he would just drop them in the middle of the floor. To me, this is a different behaviour (I mention this because I’ve talked about it with dm and she thinks dd is just taking after her dad). She sees him for one day every weekend but normally doesn’t stay overnight so most of her contact is with me.
I’m quite tidy, though not obsessive about it, and our house is generally reasonably tidy but homely – I’m saying that because I was reading up about hoarding and it was talking about either growing up in a messy home, or growing up lacking material (or emotional) things and being afraid, subconsciously, of not having enough. None of this is true for dd.
Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing? Any advice how to address it? Or what it is? Please help!
TL:DR – DD deliberately hides dirty clothes and other things around her room. What can I do?