.png)
.png)
Organization is an important skill to learn, but a challenging one for many kids and teens to master. When organization doesn’t come naturally to a child, they often look at it as a daunting, unappealing task that they want to avoid. These feelings are understandable, as getting organized and staying organized can be really challenging! The best way to combat these feelings is to help your child get excited about organization by making the process fun. This blog post outlines a few tips to help you make organization more fun for your child in order to motivate them to stick to organizational strategies.
The easiest way to get excited about organizational tools is to personalize them. Whether the tool is for mental organization like a planner, or for physical organization like baskets and folders, have your child choose items in their favorite colors and allow them to personalize the items. For more artistic children, they might really enjoy spending time decorating their tools, drawing on them, adding stickers, or even more elaborate artistic endeavors . For others, it might just mean choosing their favorite color, or simply selecting the item they like best. Personalizing their tools will help your child feel more ownership over their tools, making them more motivated to use them.
Games are the best way to make everything more fun. Consider turning different processes around organization into a game. While decluttering or sorting items, consider a game in which getting rid of a certain amount of items or reaching a certain checkpoint yields a reward. If you have a big organizational overhaul in mind, break the process down into steps. After each step, consider assigning different point values or rewards, based on the speed or efficiency in which you and your child finish the task. You might turn it into a contest, to see who can sort items quicker or who can come up with the best organizational plan. Although gamifying the process is simple, it can be a highly effective way to make the process more fun and help your child buy in. Note: You might think teenagers are too old for these types of games, but with the right rewards and the right enthusiasm, they can get just as competitive and have just as much fun!
Organizing a physical space or creating systems to organize digital and mental spaces doesn’t seem like a “fun” task to people who don’t love to organize. So, a great way to make it more fun is to turn the experience into a party! Set aside a specific time to organize, and let your child know it’s an organizing party. Consider inviting friends or family over to help. Tackling the task as a team will make it feel more important and more fun. Keep the mood of the task light and fun, playing music, and making a plan while allowing people to get off track to chat and have fun. When you turn an organizing session into an event, it automatically becomes more fun and allows for more buy in from your child.
The initial task of getting organized is an important one, but it’s equally important to maintain consistency and build habits around organizational systems. For this reason, a key part of keeping your child bought in to organization is to celebrate sticking to their routines. If you’re organizing a bedroom, desk, or backpack, you might consider a weekly clean-out session to get things back in order. During that session, attach a celebration like a fun activity or favorite meal after its completion. If you’re building habits around digital systems, schedule some check-ins with your child and be sure to celebrate them staying on track. If they get off track, use these checkpoints as an opportunity to help them rethink their systems and support them, but try to build some excitement around the rebuilding process. When you focus on the positive, appealing parts of organization, your child will stop thinking about it as a daunting task and start looking forward to activities around keeping themself organized.
Some teens need more support than others when it comes to organization and other Executive Functioning difficulties. While parents can do a lot to support their child, sometimes they might need an expert to help. YA Success Coach offers 1-1 coaching sessions for teens to support them in building systems that are supportive to their unique needs and centered around building independence for long-term success. If you think your child might benefit from more specialized support in Executive Functioning, contact me today to learn about the different options available.
Having a conversation is the first step to helping your child realize their full potential and set them up for success!