How to get your kid organized

Illustration by Jesse Kuhn

For parents, the phrase back to school conjures associations that have nothing to do with classrooms and teachers: mornings at home with your child whining and searching for lost items, for instance, and evenings derailed by fights and last-minute homework sessions. If only the little bugger were more organized, you sigh, he’d give you the permission slip a week before the field trip (like you’ve asked him to do a million times), rather than the day of. He’d finish his homework on a consistent basis, so you wouldn’t need to monitor him constantly. And he’d choose his outfit the night before, so he wouldn’t be all “Mom! Mom! Where are my favorite jeeeans?” five minutes before you have to leave.

But how do you teach kids to be more organized? Judging from all the “Get Organized NOW!”–type books, magazines, superstores and TV shows, we adults are a bunch of scatterbrained Messy Marvins ourselves. But before you rush out to the Container Store in hopes of buying your way to orderliness, let’s first take a look inside the brain.

Right up front, above and behind your eyes, is your “executive function center.” And yes, it’s kinda like where Gary, the boss’s busybody assistant/gatekeeper, sits and makes sure that everything gets done. Executive functions include, among other things, filtering out distractions (“inhibition,” in neurological jargon), planning for the future (foresight), remembering what happened in the past (hindsight), time management and juggling different tasks at once (working memory). But just as Gary can’t always handle his workload, the brain isn’t always up to the task. Sometimes it’s bad at inhibition, causing your tween to check e-mail every 30 seconds instead of doing her science project. Sometimes hindsight isn’t so hot: Your first-grader doesn’t remember that he can never get out of the house in just 20 minutes, so he’ll try to do it again.

Okay, you get it. Organization is a brain function—meaning disorganization is as biologically based as, say, dyslexia. “Just as punishment doesn’t teach kids how to read, it doesn’t help them get more organized,” cautions Martin Kutscher, a pediatric neurologist and coauthor of the new book Organizing the Disorganized Child. Nagging won’t do the trick either. You wouldn’t exclaim, “But we went over this yesterday!” to a child who can’t yet read.

What you’d do is identify his main stumbling blocks and provide tricks for working around them, until eventually he gets it on his own. In the case of organization, your child likely won’t “get it” completely until he’s long out of your direct care (around the same time he figures out how to do his own laundry). In the meantime, you need to work with his organizational quirks. If he always dumps his dirty clothes in the middle of his room, stick a hamper in qqqqthe middle of his room—no matter what it looks like. If he always loses his homework, buy him a neon orange folder and have him put all the assignments in it before bed; then make sure he puts the folder in his backpack. Think that sounds a little helicopter-ish? “You can try letting him sink or swim at first,” Kutscher advises. Let him go to school without his homework and face the consequences. But if that doesn’t help, Kutscher adds, “stop letting him sink.”

Of course, being messy, easily distracted or chronically late doesn’t just make for frustrating mornings. It can affect your child’s performance at school, his self-esteem and his family relationships. In fact, if your child is seriously challenged in all of his executive functions, he—and we use the male pronoun intentionally here, as boys are more likely to be so challenged—may have an attention deficit disorder. That makes listening to a teacher, studying and keeping neat extremely difficult.

But every student needs help with study habits and organization. And so do we. After all, just when we finally figured out how to meet deadlines, pay our bills online and organize our vacation photos, along came these moody, messy little people who’ve thrown everything back into disarray.

So before the school year begins…get organized now!

Intro | Study strategies | Backpack basics | Sample schedule | Organizational supplies
Quiz: What is your kid’s organizing style?

See more...

• Features
• Articles from this issue