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How to Help Your Child Become Organized.

© Barbara Fowler

For years my son has puzzled me with his behaviour when it comes to putting things away (like the coat goes on the floor) and he goes totally ballistic when he cannot find something which happens quite often, even if that item is right in front of his nose. In fact, he has our family trained so well that we all rush to find whatever item he cannot find before he has a melt down. He seems to become extremely anxious when an item has gone missing, or been misplaced.

As a young child, he spread toys from one end of the house to another (actually, he still does this) and while he could help clean up, he would much rather have paid attention to his special topic. If he had spent most of the day lining up a row of cars, making elaborate jumps and tracks, he was very reluctant to put it away at the end of the day because he wanted to continue playing with the same toys the next day. If I cleaned up, he could never find anything.

When he was around the age of 8, we entered the "paper" battles. He would cover every surface, table, floor, you name it, with drawings he had made, or information obtained from the internet about any topic that he found interesting. He would spend hours creating a video game on paper, drawing all the settings first, then all the characters, producing mountains of paper every week. About this time, he started calling me a "neat freak" in response to my frequent nagging to pick the paper up and put it somewhere else rather than leaving it where it was - which was everywhere.

I used to think that the reason he had difficulty finding items or putting them away was because he was too busy thinking about his latest special interest, or distracted by other things going on around him. I now know that this disorganization is caused by visual perception difficulties and that these difficulties can often occur in children and youth with Asperger Syndrome. He cannot find items because when he looks for one thing, his visual perception is distracted by all the items that he is looking at and he cannot filter out the other items. If he never puts an item away, it should be where he left it and much easier to find.

It is important to assist your child obtain organizational skills as this will help him/her in later life and promote independance. If your child seems disorganized, you may want to try the following suggestions:

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