CanNOT deal with the constant messes and toy clutter, questioning my ability to establish consistency in cleanup expectations.
I am big on establishing consistency, communicating expectations, and following through. Here are some of the reasons why this has been questionable regarding my daughter (6) putting away her things:
-Her time is limited at home. Between my work schedule and her dad’s visitation schedule, my daughter cannot WAIT for unstructured play time at home. I feel compassion and want her to be able to decompress and have creative free play to help her wind down. Since evening wind down takes a couple hours, it feels like I would be asking her to clean up just as she has finally started to relax. Then the demand would get her all fired up, distracted, and hyper again.
-Stuff. Stuff. Stuff. I do not want all this stuff in our apartment. She comes home from her dad’s with a different toy almost every time. HIGH conflict with him, so even simply sending the stuff back is a risk for me. PLUS my daughter resists sending it back. Should I just donate all this so I don’t have to ask her to put it away??
My concern is that some times I might be adamant that she clean up, and other days I can recognize that she is completely tapped out. Asking her to clean up would probably delay bedtime by another hour, even though picking up toys and dropping them in a basket could take 30 seconds without ADHD. Tonight, I tried the counting, “let’s see how long it’ll take…” and she demanded that I restart counting for when she was “ready.” Since time/schedule demands are another area of struggle, I felt the need to continue counting because of the reality that “time waits for no one.” Then I realized we were in a ridiculous power struggle, I should not have asked that she clean up since she just laid down, and now feel I can’t follow through with consequences because I “should have known” not to ask her. BUT THE CONSTANT MESSES ARE NOT WORKING FOR MY BRAIN.
Any thoughts…. I wondered if I should simply clean up after her because in the short term it is SO much easier. But I see the risk in her never learning. I feel like I’m trying every technique in the book, every collaborative game to make it easy. But the schedule and her bandwidth feel like real barriers and I wonder if I should give up the idea that she will learn to clean up after herself any time soon.