The 200 Item Clothing Challenge.

As someone with ADHD,  I am always interested in ways to reduce unwanted distractions in my life.   A few years ago I started reading about people who had taken something called the "100 item challenge".  This is for folks who really want to live with the smallest possible amount of stuff.  They basically reduce everything they own down to 100 items.  Now, I knew that was not going to be for me, but it did get me thinking.

I ended up thinking about all of this the next time I decided to clean out my closet - which I do a couple times a year - and I piled everything on the bed.  There was a lot of stuff.  Then I decided to empty my dresser, the coat rack, and my shoe organizers.  Then I added purses, scarves, and belts.  It actually made me feel kind-of gross.  Most of the stuff I didn't even wear. 

I started thinking about the 100 item challenge, and wondered if I could get this pile down to that.  It occurred to me that not so long ago average people lived with much less to wear and survived without being arrested for indecency.  Maybe I could too.  So I thought about what would be in the average woman's wardrobe 100 years ago.  I needed a 5-6 outfits for work.  I needed something to wear for weddings and funerals.  I needed stuff to wear at home. and of course I needed sleepwear and underwear.

Well, I decided to do the 100 item challenge for that season and was able to get the pile down to 100 items.  Because I wasn't truly trusting of this new system yet, I put everything left into plastic tubs and stored it.  And yes, I counted the number of items.  It actually totalled in at 85.

Doing this turned out to be one of the best things I have ever done in my life.  Seriously. 

Suddenly I not only could get all of the laundry done in two reasonable sized loads, I had to do it each week so I would have enough to wear.  Choosing clothing in the morning was easy, because there wasn't that much of a decision to make.  Since I had my favorite clothes, and nothing worn out, ripped or stained, I was happy with what I had on every day.  My closet stayed neater.

The next time closet-cleaning time came around, I did three things.  First of all, I added in the rest of the clothes I wanted to have to complete a year-round cycle and stay under 200 items.  At this point I was confident that I could live with this amount of clothing, so secondly I bagged up everything else and took it to Goodwill.  Thirdly, I took anything that was worn and stained out of the current collection and worked on replacing it.  I have been using that routine every since.

Now because I have fewer clothes and therefore wear them out sooner, I do buy new stuff just about every season.  Because I'm not buying a lot, I do buy decent quality items.  I also tend to buy things I can wash, since I don't really have time for items to be at the dry cleaner.  Finally, I buy a lot of mix and match skirts, pants and tops and only have a few dresses.  Because I do a lot of mix and match, I tend to buy from just a few stores so that all of the colors go together.  This cuts down on my clothes shopping, which I do not generally like anyway.

If you like fashion and it's your hobby, this might not be something for you.  But if you like to look good with a minimum of fuss and bother, you might want to consider this challenge.  It's made a really difference in my ADHD life.  Maybe it can in yours.

It's Not Just Food and Sleep.

Stressed out kids.  Seems I've been reading a lot about this lately.  (see The Epidemic of Stressed Parents Raising Stressed Kids - Huff Post )  I see it all around me at school and in private practice - anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, etc.  According to this Huff Post article, one out of five children suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder.  That’s five or six children in your child’s classroom. Maybe your child is one of them.  So you might be calling me for help.

If you do call me, you will soon learn that one of my favorite mottos about problems that kids and families face is that everything is overdetermined .  That means that there is more than one factor that causes an outcome.  Conversely, it often takes more than one intervention to change that outcome.  Stress in families is overdetermined. We talk a lot about various things kids should and shouldn’t eat.  We talk about exercise and time outside.  We talk about sleep.  We talk about reduced screen time.  (see TIME - America’s Teens Outscore Adults On Stress ) All of those things are good to consider.  However, there is not one specific thing that is going to be the “silver bullet” for reducing stress, or ADHD, or depression, or anxiety.  That being said; there are some other things I think we ought to think about adding to the mix.

• Technology – The amount of time children and teens spend online is discussed a great deal.  I think there are other aspects to technology that need to be considered, specifically about school.  My children graduated from high school in June 2011.  At that time, a few teachers were asking for assignments to be turned in online, and some were posting assignments on websites.  In three short years, I have watched a revolution take place.  Now assignments are given and turned in online, and grades and countless other activities related to school live on the web also.  There are two stressful aspects to this revolution that I think schools have not fully considered.  One is that there are still families who don’t have the hardware needed to interface with all of these technological activities.  I am working with a young lady whose school does a great deal online.  The sole computer at her house is a 1998 iMac on a cable modem.  Some sites will not even load reliably on her machine.  Her parents have limited resources, and she is embarrassed to say anything to her teachers.  I also wonder what happens to children when the cable is disconnected because the bill hasn’t been paid or because there isn’t service where they live.  I think this may cause stress for more people than we think it does.  Another technological issue occurs for children who do not have technologically savvy parents.   What happens when the network goes down, a post on Edmodo is due, and neither the parent or a child have the technological know-how to fix the problem?  How many times has there been stress in your house because homework is due, and the technology is “down”?  Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE educational technology.  For many applications, it’s a wonderful thing.  I just think we need to be mindful of the consequences of relying on it, and then penalizing children when problems arise that are out of their control.

• Common Core and Standardization – With the technological revolution we also have a curricular and pedagogical revolution happening.  Last week I met with a young man in 7th grade.  In one week in his social studies class they had covered the end of WWI and the Great Depression.  Monday and Tuesday on the first topic, and Wednesday and Thursday on the second.  This young man is pretty bright, so we always start with what he remembers and we build from there.  When I asked him what he knew about those topics, the answer I got was, “The Treaty of Versailles caused the Great Depression, so Franklin Roosevelt had to fight Hitler even though he didn’t want to.  Oh, and the stock market crashed right after the war.”  Granted he’s got ADHD and tends to miss things, but let me be clear.  The material covered 1918 and 1919, skipped to 1929 and ended at 1939.  In four days.  He had no context.  You should have seen the look on his face when he realized he was missing an entire decade in the timeline.  Like I said, he’s pretty bright, but this is not the first time he’s mixed two completely different concepts together that had been introduced in a short span of time.  I am not laying this at the feet of his teachers.  They are expected to cover certain pieces of material (standards, goals?) on a certain schedule.  As we work harder and harder in schools to cover more and more material in ever-shorter periods of time, we are confusing children.  This is not rigor.  I was a fan of Common Core when it was first introduced, but if this is going to be the result, no way.  Even more, for children that have organizational difficulties, the pace and demands of keeping up with all of this can be a hurdle too big to overcome.  Talk about stress! If your child brings home math homework in the 2nd grade and the question is - “Look at the following numbers and circle the one that is the median. 208, 246, 273, 264, 223, and 210” — could you help them?  Do you know what the median is?  (I learned when I took statistics in graduate school.  Not everyone has taken statistics.) Does the school expect you to?  If the answer to the first question is no, and the second is yes, you need to let someone know.  Parents need to be engaged in this and let the school and district know when their children have had enough.  Parents also need to start asking schools to teach specific strategies for different ways of planning work and learning material.  Finding the ways that work best for your child to study, finish homework and plan and complete projects are life skills that everyone needs to learn to keep stress under control. 

• Stuff – This is not just materialism.  It’s about the complications that stuff adds to our lives.  I do a lot of home visits.  I see bedrooms filled with stuff.  Not just toys, but clothes, shoes, cosmetics, stuffed animals, books and all kinds of ephemera.  Stuff makes life complicated for kids.  It’s complicated to figure out what to do first.  It’s complicated to figure out what to wear.  It’s complicated to figure out where to find anything.  It’s certainly complicated to figure out how to keep it organized and neat.  It’s plain old complicated just to look at everything!  All of that causes stress.  If your child doesn’t want to part with things, why not just put the majority of it away?  It can be cycled and re-cycled back into the room.  Take the clothing pile down to what they need to wear in a week.  If something rips, gets stained, or just looks worn, replace it with something from the stash.  In my mind, a stress-free room looks, well, empty.

• Loneliness – Think back to your childhood and your best friendships.  How did they start?  Many times they started at school, other times in the neighborhood.  Think about your earliest memories with those friends.  Did your parents always like those children? What do you remember doing with them that brought you close and can still make you smile? Chances are it was on the playground at school, or in someone’s yard, or even in someone’s house.  Most likely it was an unstructured activity without a hovering adult or maybe without an adult at all.  Maybe it was just sitting around doing nothing at all.  Now think about your own children.  Do they have the same types of activities with other children?  They probably don’t have them at school for more than 30 minutes, so don’t count on that.  Do they have them in the neighborhood?  Why not? Close relationships, the kind that grow closeness and trust, the kind where you can share secrets, the kind that build lasting bonds, do not develop at karate and ballet class.  They also don’t develop during play dates when Mom picks (or influences the choice of) the guest.  They develop through spontaneous, unstructured activities when kids can do what they want – with whom they want.  (Within reason, of course)  I talk to many children who do not have those opportunities.  They are lonely.  A child does not have to spend lots of time alone to be lonely.  A child who does spend time alone may not necessarily be lonely.  It’s not the quantity of the relationships; it’s the quality of the relationships. 

What do you see here that might be affecting your child?  How do you think you might be able to change?  I would be interested in hearing your perspective.  Leave a comment here, on my FB page at Pamela Mecca Seymour, LPC or tweet @pam327.
Thanks!

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My Seven Hairbrushes

It's been about five years since I've started altering my environment to reduce stress.  I'm not talking about soothing paint colors or quiet music or fluffy pillows.  Those things are wonderful, and they do help reduce stress, but I'm talking about more about my stuff and where it is.

I started to get a clue about this when I read the upteenth psychological report for a child with ADHD that recommended they have a set of textbooks at home and one at school.  I hadn't really done any reading on ADHD at that point because I'd just recently been diagnosed myself.  At that point my son had not been formally diagnosed, so I was still in the dark about how the ADHD brain really functions.  This idea of duplicates seemed pretty cool.  A rather elegant solution to leaving stuff behind all the time.

One of the small things in my life that caused a great deal of stress was never seeming to have a hairbrush when I needed one.  I had started carrying a very small purse, and the hairbrush I liked would always get stuffed in last.  When I had to dig something out, the hairbrush was the first thing out, and inevitably left where I put it down.  Lots of bad hair days.  I finally realized that like a duplicate set of textbooks, I needed duplicate hairbrushes in several different places EXCEPT my purse.  So now I have one in both bathrooms, all three cars, my desk at school, and in my suitcase.  May seem like overkill, but I'm never without one.

The hairbrush thing turned out to be the start of other things that changed small stressful areas of my life.  My car keys are now either in my ignition, or clipped with a carabiner to the outside of my purse.  I only keep my carkeys on that carabiner so that I don't use them for any other purpose than to drive the car.  I looked at every horizontal surface in the house and removed as much visual clutter as I could.  I pared down everything in my closet to a minimum.  Most weeks I go to the grocery store only once, and I tend to buy the same stuff.  I come home and make food for the entire week.  I take the sheets off the bed, wash and dry them and put them right back on so they don't add to the laundry pile.

All of these things are small, but they make a big difference in my stress level on a day-to-day basis.  I know that my brain does a poor job of keeping me conscious of where I put things, so important things always have to be in the same obvious place or places.  I need duplicates of some things in several places.  (Like my phone charger.)  I know that I have a hard time "getting going" when it comes to housework and laundry.  Having a huge pile of laundry to do invites my brain to suggest putting it off until I "have more time".  Seems like a piece of cake to wash, dry, fold and distribute a small load.  Somehow it seems easier to keep a house clean that has less stuff laying around.  I'm still not sure exactly what executive function is involved in that.  I know that the visual stimulation of all the stuff at the grocery store tends to stress me out.  I want to be out of the place so sometimes I don't make good decisions, buy stuff I really don't need, or leave without getting everything I need.  Telling myself that I only buy the same detergent regardless of what is on sale, and doing that with other items beside, actually saves some money and definitely a lot of time.  My phone has a location-specific list maker.  (So when I drive to Target or BJs, a list of items I need at those stores pops up...)  That has helped a lot, but no technology is foolproof.

I still struggle with other issues of disorganization, activation (getting going), and maintenance.  You ought to see my craft room right now.  Whew!  I'm always on the prowl for some new strategy to add to my life, but I'm really happy about what I've done so far.  If you have tips that have helped reduce your ADHD stress, feel free to share them in the comments section below.