“Go clean your room.”

Okay, but which part? The floor? The desk? The mysterious collection of things that apparently live on the desk now?

And are we cleaning, or are we about to spend forty-five minutes looking at something we forgot we owned? Because those are very different afternoon plans. 😂

With my kiddos, it depends on the kid and whether they’re sharing a room. Several of my boys have shared over the years, and when the mess starts becoming an issue, I bring it back to three things:

Garbage. Dishes. Dirty laundry.

That’s our bare minimum. Get the garbage out, take the dishes to the kitchen, and gather the dirty laundry. If the whole list feels like too much, we can start with just the garbage.

We do not need to make seventeen decisions about a desk drawer right now.

Breaking a big task into smaller steps is also a strategy described by the National Institute of Mental Health (2024). Our three-item list is how that looks in our house.

The funny part? Once my boys get those three things done, they usually feel less overwhelmed and often keep cleaning. They might decide to clear their desk, too.

Although, by then, their desk is usually pretty cleared off. Turns out a fair amount of “clean your desk” was garbage, dishes, and laundry wearing a disguise. Lol.

That little bit of progress helps. They can see what they’ve done, and the rest doesn’t look quite so impossible. If they keep going, wonderful. The three things they already did still count either way.

Also… we might be making cleaning look terrible

If we’re running around the house cleaning and bitching about cleaning, our little kids are watching a very convincing advertisement for how much cleaning sucks.

And listen, I am not asking anybody to sing lovingly to a toilet. Some jobs are just jobs. But we can sneak a little fun into this whole situation.

Make it a game! Beat the timer. Do a five-minute cleanup dash before bed. See how many toys can get home before the bell.

Five minutes feels like something we can try. “Clean up everything” feels like we might still be here next Thursday.

And timers—oh, I love a timer. For younger kiddos, I mean those big kitchen timers they can actually look at. Give them a way to see the time instead of leaving “five minutes” floating around as a mysterious grown-up measurement.

Pick the sound for your kiddo, though. If ticking or a loud ring makes them miserable, a quiet visual timer is welcome to the party. And if beating the clock stresses them out, we can just use it to show when we’re stopping.

Clear, simple expectations and practical help with cleaning are also part of the National Institute of Mental Health’s (2024) guidance for supporting children with ADHD. In our house, that means giving the job a size we can actually get our heads around.

The bedtime dash gets an ending. The three-item list gets to be three items. We can tackle more another time.

So if the room is a lot today, start where we start:

Garbage. Dishes. Dirty laundry.

Let’s find the desk before we worry about organizing it. 💜