ADHD: Will Kids in a Hunter Household Do the Laundry?

Martha though not, and then she did something that I thought was both unthinkable and impossible...

Getting kids in a Hunter household to maintain any sort of an organizational system is a challenge, particularly when you realize that for Hunters if something isn’t always visible it often may not exist at all. Martha in Michigan found a solution that echo’s my filing system in my office, where everything is in a basket or on a shelf where I can see things.

From Martha in Michigan:

This is probably so simple that you won’t want to include it on your website, but it’s really helped me out and I’d like to share it.

I used to be totally disorganized in my laundry. I did the laundry for the entire family (I have two ADHD kids, one twelve and the other fifteen, and an ADHD husband, not to mention myself), and everything was always a mess. The kids and my husband both just threw their dirty clothes on the floor, and I had a pile in my closet (which I thought, at least, looked a bit more organized because I could close the door).

Then a friend showed me a system she’d developed for her home, and it’s incredible how it’s helped here at my house!

She went to K-Mart and bought a dozen laundry baskets, half red and half white. With an indelible felt pen, she wrote on each of the red ones the name of one of her family members, along with the word “colored clothes,” and on each of the white ones she wrote a family member’s name and the word “whites.” Then she gave each person in the family their two baskets.

When the person takes off their dirty clothes, they go directly into the baskets: the whites into the white basket and the coloreds into the colored basket.

And then she did something that I thought was both unthinkable and impossible: she told everybody that they were now responsible for doing their own laundry. She did a little seminar on a Saturday morning and showed her kids (her youngest is seven) how to use the washer and dryer, and how to fold and put away clothes. And they did it!

Well, I told her that would never work in my house because everybody in my house has ADD and the place always looks like a tornado hit it. “Just wait until they run out of clean underwear,” she said. “They’ll do it. Just try it.”

So I did.

And it works!

It’s really amazing to me how the kids have taken to this. One of the boys has even become a connoisseur of laundry detergents, and he’ll only use Tide, so every month or two I have to take him to the store to buy his detergent.

In addition to cleaning up the floors and making our bedrooms look considerably less messy (I suppose I could probably go the next step and use hampers instead of baskets if I really wanted a showcase house, but the baskets are so easy for them to carry to the laundry room when they’re full), this system has taught my children about being organized and about personal responsibility.

They aren’t as quick to abuse their clothes as they were before, and are more careful about spills and stains. And I think this is probably a very good life skill for them as they grow up.