“Oh me, oh me, oh my.”
That’s what I think to myself as I watch a child start sweeping haphazardly around a room or scrubbing random parts of a shower wall. A little here, a little over there. No rhyme or reason. Heavens to Betsy!
This type of low-performance cleaning has multiple explanations:
1. Lack of good intention
This is often what parent assume, and it’s sometimes true.
Maybe the child couldn’t care less about actually doing the chore right. If your child has previously gotten their chores done for you at any point in history, then this change in performance is a red flare in the air telling you there’s an emotional/relational issue that needs to be worked out.
Or, maybe the child purposefully wants to do it wrong/poorly. This is less common than you might think but absolutely possible. Again this behavior is often a flare in the sky trying to tell you there’s an emotional/relational issue that is laced with vengeance or self-loathing.
It can also be a way the child is communicating through their behavior that whatever privilege comes after the chore (“Once you get that done, then you can / we are going to...”) is more than the child can handle for whatever reason.
2. Lack of training
It could also be that the child hasn’t been taught the optimal way to do this task.
You may think the task is “common sense”. Many parents hand their kids the bottle of cleaning solution and rag and say, “Go clean the...” And that’s the end of the instructions.
That’s not enough for our children with RAD, even the brilliant ones. For your own sanity and their own chance at success, every child with RAD must be taught multiple times how to do the task. (See previous blog post “Teaching Chores”.)
3. Lack of spatial reasoning
It’s also very possible that the child has been taught how to do it and they do want to get the job done correctly, but their brain doesn’t naturally perceive or remember how to organize the task within the space.
This is truly a neurologically based difficulty common to children with RAD.
Number 3 has left many a parent flabbergasted as they watch Sweetie Pie do things that seem to make no sense like picking up the small scrubber for the large pot or the large scrubber for the small pot.
If you find yourself wondering, “Why doesn’t my kid just use her brain?”,
it may be that her brain needs help developing spatial reasoning,
among other skills needed for the task.
Solution!!!
Option 1: The Procedural Rule of Thumb
Teach your child with every chore to work top to bottom and left to right and back to front. Have them say it out loud. In teaching this, you aren’t just helping them do chores more efficiently, you are actually helping to organize their brain.
Teaching order is organizing, especially for a traumatized brain.
Cleaning the mirror? Where do you start? The top left.
Mopping the bathroom? Where do you start? The far back corner. And, did you clean the counter top before getting to the floor? No? Oops, do the counter top first (counter = top of the room, floor = bottom).
Almost every time I assign a chore I ask the child, “So where are you going to start?”
Option 2: Demarcate the space.
Before one 7 year old swept my dining room I moved the chairs to form a boundary line where he should stop. The table and the wall form the other 2 boundaries. The total area he was sweeping was about 3 ft x 3 ft. When he finished that space, I moved the chairs to mark the next space.
Next I taught him to move the chairs himself! Now he is using a tool to help himself. Perfect.
Towels can be used as boundary line markers. Grout lines also work. Who knows what you’ll come up with?
Option 3: Map it out.
A few years into his healing, my 10 year old now understood the concept of breaking the space into sections and could even do it without physical boundary markers. The problem was that he would skip sections, so we made a map and hung it where he could access it for his chore.
When he didn’t use the map, he usually missed a section and had to do it over. When he DID use the map, he usually got it done right the first time! He noticed this correlation.
Whether he was in the mood to do things well (and use the map) or not, I never had to worry that I should be helping him because he had all the resources he needed, should he choose to utilize them. It was also a quick sign that his psyche wasn’t in the best of places if he did the chore without the map and out of order. WARNING. WARNING. WARNING. Tantrum on the horizon!
Some chores that require spatial reasoning:
Loading a dishwasher
Wiping a dining table
Folding large towels
Folding clothes
Sweeping and mopping
Vacuuming larger spaces
Mowing the lawn
Making the bed, especially putting on fitted sheets
Painting