Living Clutter Free Forever - decluttering tips,home organizing, minimalist living

How to support ADHD kids with decluttering, tidying, and home organization with expert tips from Penny Williams #143

• Caroline Thor - Professional Organizer - KonMari® Consultant

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Does your child struggle to keep their space tidy? Do you feel like you’re constantly nagging, yet nothing changes?

You're not alone. Kids with ADHD and other neurodivergent traits often find home organization overwhelming. Executive dysfunction, out-of-sight-out-of-mind tendencies, and clutter blindness make traditional decluttering and tidying strategies feel impossible.

But what if I told you there’s a way to make organizing easier—without the meltdowns, the frustration, or the endless battles?

In this week’s episode of Living Clutter Free Forever, I’m joined by Penny Williams, a parenting coach specializing in neurodivergent families. We dive into practical, strengths-based declutter strategies that help ADHD kids (and their parents!) create a clutter-free home without feeling overwhelmed.

✅ How to work with your child’s brain, not against it
✅ Small wins that build long-term organizing habits
✅ Why traditional tidying methods fail—and what works instead
✅ A sneak peek into the Unlocking ADHD Summit, where I’ll be sharing even more ADHD-friendly home organization strategies!

Even if your child doesn’t have ADHD, this episode is gold for all parents. These strategies work for every child who struggles with clutter, tidying, and organization—so don’t skip this one!

You can help your child develop skills to manage their space in a way that works for them. And trust me—what we share in this episode will make organizing feel less like a battle and more like a win-win for your whole family.

🎧 Tune in now! 

Grab your free spot for the Unlocking ADHD Summit—you won’t want to miss it.

I would LOVE to hear from you. Text Message me here.

Thanks for listening! For more organizational motivation, support and free resources:
Join my online membership Clutter Free Collective
Join my podcast Facebook group Living Clutter Free Forever Podcast: KonMari® Inspired Organizing | Facebook
Visit my website www.caroline-thor.com
Come and say 'hi' on Instagram @caro.thor
Follow me on Facebook @carolineorganizer

Speaker 1:

Hi there, I'm Caroline Thor, professional organiser, konmari consultant, teacher and mum of three. I started off my life as a mum feeling overwhelmed, disorganised and desperately trying to carve out some time for me amongst the nappies, chaos and clutter. One day, one small book called the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying changed everything and I began to learn strategies for making everyday life easier. Today, I have the systems in place that means life can throw almost anything at me, and I want to share them with you. If you're an overwhelmed mum struggling to keep it together, then this is the podcast for you. Grab a coffee and settle in for a quick chat with someone who gets your reality. Hi there, and thank you for coming to join me today on the Living Clutter-Free Forever podcast.

Speaker 1:

I'm Caroline, and I'm a KonMari consultant and professional organiser and mum to three kids, and I've always been really transparent on this podcast about the fact that I have one child with autism and ADHD and another child with an ADHD diagnosis, and I am so happy that my guest today is Penny Williams. Now Penny is a parenting coach for neurodiverse families and teaches stuck and struggling parents how to dial down the big emotions and big behaviors and maximize successes for their neurodivergent kids. She's the award-winning author of four books on ADHD, including Boy Without Instructions, and what I love about Penny is at the core of her work is the certainty that every human deserves to feel seen, heard and understood. Now I know you may be listening and you may not have a child with a neurodiversity, but there are still going to be things that you hear today that will be so, so helpful to you as a parent, so I suggest you stay tuned in. Enjoy, welcome, penny.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat with you.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm excited to chat with you. I've been on your podcast and I love it when we can then do a podcast swap and someone comes on mine, so that's really fun, and we've got lots to talk about today because there's exciting things happening. But first of all, would you like to tell everyone a little bit about yourself and your background?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I am basically a parent coach and an educator around neurodivergent children, so I help families of kids with ADHD, autism, anxiety, learning disabilities, all of that what we often refer to as alphabet soup, because so many of our kids don't just have one diagnosis, but often multiple diagnoses, and my kid is certainly that kid as well. And I really started this work because of my kid, because when he was diagnosed with ADHD in 2008, there was no help out there for parents. The physician gave me two one-page fact sheets on ADHD and a prescription for medication and said I'll see you in six months. That was it. And Attitude Magazine existed, which was a great resource, but nobody was really saying hey, this is what you need to know, this is what you need to do, this is a path that is going to be the most successful for you. None of that existed, and so I really was very obsessive, to be honest, about ADHD.

Speaker 2:

For a few years, I was spending every moment I possibly could. I was putting off the work that I was doing. At that point, I was only talking about ADHD, only thinking about ADHD, to the detriment of myself and my family. I learned, but I finally figured out what I needed to know what was the path forward, what was the mindset shift that we needed to make as that parent. And then, when I sort of could look back and realize that I thought, well, I've done all of these many, many hundreds of hours of research and trial and error, and I need to share it because still at the time, a few years after, there wasn't anything out there and so I blogged and I wrote books, and then I podcast, and then I created courses and then summits and so many things. But it's so needed because the journey of raising a neurodivergent kid is very, very different. It has to be different or there's not going to be any success.

Speaker 1:

I totally agree and I totally relate to going down this rabbit hole. I've talked really openly in this podcast about the fact that I have two kids with an ADHD diagnosis, one who also has autism PDA attached to that, and as a mom, you just want to do the best you can for your kid and, as you say, the information now is luckily much more available. But you still go down these rabbit holes because you want to find the thing that perhaps could help your family and it is going to be slightly different for everyone, which is why I love what you do, because you sort of bring all the information together. Your podcast is incredible. That's how I found out about you. Would you just like to tell everyone about your podcast?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the podcast started as Parenting ADHD Podcast and a couple of years ago I changed the name to Beautifully Complex because what I was learning was that so much of what I was talking about for parenting kids with ADHD, teaching kids with ADHD, was applicable also to autism level one and level two. And my kid also got that additional diagnosis of autism about the time I would say maybe a year or two before I started the podcast, and so I knew a ton about ADHD because that's all I had been thinking about for six years prior to that additional diagnosis, and I just wanted to open the door to all neurodivergence because really what we were talking about would be helpful to all neurodivergence, because really what we were talking about would be helpful to all neurodivergence. And I have anxiety myself. I really struggled with social anxiety for decades. I still do to some degree. I'm able to push myself more now than I was my first 40 years of life, and so there's a lot about anxiety in there too in my own experience and a lot about my own family.

Speaker 2:

You know, sharing my own story and my kid's story, with his permission, really helps people to feel less alone. You know, when you get this diagnosis, you feel so isolated, you feel like it must only be your kid, it must only be your parenting, and the truth is it's not, and there are a million of us out there going through similar struggles and just knowing that and hearing that can be such a relief, and so we have lots of experts. Sometimes it's just me talking about our experiences or what I've learned over the years or what I'm really passionate about. On occasion I can get on a soapbox about what needs to change for our kids. Right, and we need that in the world, and so it's just a huge resource now with I just last week released the 300th episode, so it's a monumental resource for parents.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic. I love listening to it and I've learned a lot as well, so thank you so much for that. Now, what we're going to talk about today is sort of this difficulty that a lot of parents have, regardless of whether their kids have an ADHD diagnosis or not or a neurodivergent, of actually trying to get your kids to tidy up their space, to be involved, to take ownership. And it is a real struggle, and kids who have ADHD really struggle with it even more, and very often parents are not aware of the executive dysfunction, perhaps other things that are going on that are going to make it more difficult. So we want to talk about that today so that parents can become aware how they can better support their kids.

Speaker 1:

But I would just like to say that if you don't have a child with a neurodivergency and you're listening, then these tips are still going to support you as well, because they're going to work with any child. But you definitely need to apply them if you have a kid on the spectrum. So you have your son. I have my two kids with ADHD. What has been your experience of how he looks after his space?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would love to start with talking about the brain a little bit, if you would allow me to back up just a second, because, yeah, I think this will help to tie it in for all parents, and not just parents of kids with ADHD. You mentioned executive dysfunction, and it's not just people with ADHD who have varying levels of executive function. Right, our brains have the ability within that thinking brain, that frontal lobe, to get things done, and it requires all of these different skills that we put in this bucket called executive functioning. And very often with ADHD I would say all the time, really, because I think it's mostly an executive dysfunction rather than an attention dysfunction but, um, you know, a lot of times those skills, some of them, are really developed and on target, developmentally maybe even advanced, and some of them are behind. We all have strengths and weaknesses, right, our brains are all wired differently and so that really impacts the ability to organize, to plan, to tidy up, right. All of these things that we expect that everyone just knows how to do and can do. And so when we do add that layer of ADHD, we're talking about some pretty extreme executive functioning challenges.

Speaker 2:

So my kid, for instance, we did many years ago, because he's 22 now, but we did the brief and I can't remember what the acronym stands for, but it's a rating scale, professional rating scale, that a psychologist would do for executive function. And then it plots all these different points on a graph with the results of the questionnaire and like the psychologist watching and all of that. And for my son, for the organization piece, his dot was the very top line of the chart. So if it was any less organization she wouldn't have even been able to plot it on the chart. That's how low the organization is for him, right? And that's just the way his brain is wired. And so we have to do a lot of things. We have to support, we have to provide tools, we have to struggle to understand that this is the way his brain is wired and he is just not an innately organized or tidy person and get okay with that, right, I am very highly functioning in organization.

Speaker 2:

Like. My brain needs things to even be symmetrical, to feel comfortable, right. So everything really has a place for me and it better be in its place, and if there's one little thing left on the counter, it like, I feel it in my body, it makes me insane, right, and so I was living with not just one but three people in my house who aren't great at tidying up and being what I would call organized and clean, and so I kept picking up behind everybody. I kept constantly reminding and nagging about cleaning up and picking up, and it was making me crazy, like it was really impacting not only me, but everyone in my house too was not happy that I was constantly nagging them right, and so I had to accept that my brain works differently than their brain, and why should they have to work in my way if I'm not expecting to work in their way?

Speaker 2:

Right, there was no flexibility in my thinking, and so I had to get really okay with like it's okay if some things are out of place sometimes, because not everybody's brain works like my brain works, and that just took the temperature down right. That just kind of gave everybody some relief, including me, and then I could really focus my thoughts and my energy on how do I help to be tidy and organized enough, right? How do I help him be able to do that? And I will admit, at 22, it's still a work in progress. We are still struggling with keeping his room cleaned up, not piling dishes and piling empty potato chip bags, and you know I can hear people listening thinking well, he shouldn't be allowed to have food in his room. Well, we tried that right, like all the typical things been there, done. That didn't work, so we're still pivoting.

Speaker 1:

I totally relate and I actually, from my own perspective, relate way more to your son than I do to you, cause I struggle with organization Like I really struggle. Um, I've never had an ADHD diagnosis, I hadn't even ever considered that I could have ADHD, but now I have two kids, potentially three, with it. I'm beginning to wonder, because I'm very much the case that if it's out of sight, out of mind, I literally forget it and I permanently am leaving things around the house in strategic places because I know if I can't see them I won't remember to do it. I will then tidy them up once they're dealt with, but if I put it away, I know it's just not going to happen.

Speaker 1:

And my kids' rooms are like that, on a scale of 100. One of my kids also has all their meals in their room just because their anxiety means that they aren't able to join us at the table at the moment. It's just totally impossible. But what I have done is gone in and said oh, I can see there's a plate. Can I take that for you and taken over that role? Because if it's not okay for me and they can't do it, then I need to take that particular role over. Otherwise I'm just stressing myself out and, as you say, we sort of have to meet them where they're at if they're not able to do it. Weirdly, the last week, after one meal of each day, they have always brought their plate back down to the kitchen. They've done it this lunchtime They've just appeared with it. So whether I've done it often enough that they've started to realize that's something that needs to be done, I don't know. But I'm really quite happy about it that one plate a day is making its way back down to the kitchen.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I totally get that. We have those celebrations all the time and I think you hit on something. So very important is that kids do well if they can. They want to do well, they want to please us, and so if their room is a pig pen, it's because they can't manage it on their own. And you going in and picking up that plate and taking it is modeling that after a meal, the plate comes out of the room, but it's also acknowledging and validating that you see that your kid is having a hard time with that right now.

Speaker 2:

That's a strategy that I learned from Seth Perler a couple of years ago, who is an executive function coach, and I was talking to him about my son. Um, he and I have become friends over the years and he was like well, why don't you just go in and take some things out of the room? And I'm like, because then he won't learn to do it, which I know better than by now. Like any coaching client, I would get so upset if they said that like I would school them on that. And yet there I was saying it and he was like but if you just went in and you picked up a stack of dishes and you walked out with it. You didn't say a word. I bet he might, and within you know some period of time, pick up something and bring it out too. And I'm like, okay, you're crazy, but I'm going to try it.

Speaker 2:

And, lo and behold, it worked. I went in there and I picked a few things up. I took an arm load out and within 20 minutes he paused what he was doing, got another arm load and brought it out. Did he finish the whole room? No, but like, just starting helps kids who struggle with task initiation, or just doing it without saying anything reminds them that that's something they also need to do. And we're doing it in a way that doesn't shame or blame, right. It doesn't attach all of those negative feelings for our kids. We're just helping and that's what they need, right? That's what that messy room is signaling to us. They need help and support with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think another thing that I have realized and I would be interested to know if this has been your experience as well my other kid has probably the messiest room in the house. I mean just terrible. And I I have got to the point. This was quite some years ago, before we even had an ADHD diagnosis, before we even had an ADHD diagnosis, and I would go in and I would want it tidied up and I would put the come on, we need, we need to do this. I would support her with it because I knew that just saying tidy your room to any child is going to be really difficult. They need support, they need you to help them learn how to do it.

Speaker 1:

But what I hadn't realized was that by changing everything, like really quickly in one day, was really stressing them out because I was changing their environment completely from what they'd been used to for weeks to suddenly everything put away and tidied up.

Speaker 1:

And that change was just too much. It just totally stressed them out and made them really really miserable too much. It just totally stressed them out and made them really really miserable and it took me a few times of me doing this to realize the damage I was causing and to then say, okay, in future what we need to do is say what's our biggest battle? Okay, we don't want dirty plates, maybe that's the thing. Or maybe we don't want dirty clothes all over the floor. So we'll go in and say how about we just pick up dirty clothes today and do it in little increments and work for a little while on keeping dirty clothes off the floor, and perhaps, when they've got used to that, we can move on to the next thing, rather than doing it in all one go. What is your experience of that, or your take on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, small steps are so, so crucial, and if you think about how overwhelming it is when a room is that messy, when there are a hundred or more items to pick up, right, it's very overwhelming. And when some of our brains get overwhelmed, we can't get started, we can't take on the task at all because it is dimming the access to our thinking brain. So the more overwhelmed our kid gets by this instruction to clean their room, the less physiologically able they are to actually do it, and so breaking it down really helps with that. It makes it a much smaller task, which feels more doable. It also makes it something that they can be successful with, and then that success brings on good feelings. Those good feelings get imprinted in our brain, right, and we're willing to do the next small task the next time we're asked.

Speaker 2:

Right, instead of putting up a wall every time, cleaning up in the room, as mentioned and that's something that I quickly learned to do was, we're just going to do one piece of it, and it needs to be an easy piece, like picking up the dirty clothes or, you know, can you just pick up books? Let's just do books today. Legos was a big one. For years there were Legos everywhere, and I would want to organize them.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I would want to have, you know, a bin for every color and a bin for every shape. And I learned really quickly that breaking things down like that did not work for my kid. We needed giant buckets to just put stuff in, and so we would have big bins full of Legos, only Legos, but big bins full of Legos. We could not organize them down smaller and you know he was fine with that. When I looked at a big bin of Legos all mixed up, I had, you know, stomach pains, but for him it worked just fine, Right, Like I don't know if you know the home edit.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, when I first saw the rainbow of organization, I swear my body just like sung I was so happy. It just made me feel so joyful. Anyway, my house does not look like that. That's a lot to ask of a person with kids anyway. But yeah, like you know, that's my brain and my kid doesn't even see the mess Like, it, doesn't register. And that was one of the biggest aha moments for me to be able to help to teach these skills and put things in place that would help him at some point.

Speaker 2:

Be able to do this on his own is recognizing that you have to notice something before you're going to do anything about it. And one of the first things I did was I took photographs of different areas of his room with him in them. With it my definition of cleaned up, them. With it, my definition of cleaned up. So a photo of his dresser with the drawers pushed in and nothing hanging out of it. A photo of his desk with some things on it, but you could see the top of the desk right. It wasn't covered in Legos and books and a million things the floor. You could see the carpet in the picture. Things were put right. He had toy bins at the time and I had a picture of him actually putting a stuffed animal in one of the toy bins and that was the toy bins, the way that I was saying they should look right.

Speaker 1:

And that was so helpful because there was a huge disconnect between what I thought was a clean room and what he thought was a clean room, because for him it didn't matter yeah you know, and I imagine you can relate to that too yeah, definitely, and visual cues are just so, so important, and I think one thing that I love about my sort of tech kit that I take with me when I go to clients is my label maker. I'm in love with my label maker. I will label anything I can and clients to start with think I've gone absolutely crazy, and then the next time I go back, they've usually bought a label maker themselves because they've realized the benefit of having everything labeled for everybody, regardless of whether you have neurodiversity in the family or not. It is such a game changer and, as you say, pictures for younger kids, just visual cues.

Speaker 1:

And the one thing I'd like to go back to as well is this idea of having one bin for each category of items, whether that be a clothing, whether that be Lego, any child or any person with ADHD. I think if there's more than one step involved in the process, it's just not going to happen. It's like this is why so many adults with ADHD really, really struggle with laundry and keeping on top of it, because there are so many steps involved in doing the laundry, and if you're listening and you really struggle with your laundry, it's not surprising there are so many parts to it, so I think that is really really important to mention.

Speaker 2:

My husband puts all of his clothes in one load? Yeah, because he clearly is the one that that my son inherited his ADHD from and he, you know, doesn't want to deal with my sorting and all of the things, and so he just throws one load of everything in and pains me, but it works for him, right, yeah exactly, and I love the fact you say it works for him.

Speaker 1:

We have to accept the fact that what works for us may not work for our child, and we have to support them in trying to find the way that does work for them so they can be successful. Your approach I love the fact you're looking for the positivity in all our kids and their successes, rather than seeing ADHD as the problem. And you have coming up the most amazing summit, which I'm really excited to be a part of. Would you like to tell everyone a bit about it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you, I would love to. It's called Unlocking ADHD Summit and there's completely free access to all 27 of the workshops. I have 29 different experts, I think, because a couple of them have more than one expert in them, and we're just taking a really strengths-based approach to ADHD. I have done other ADHD summits in the past and there are a lot of ADHD summits out there now and we talk a lot about the problems and the things that we struggle with and we give a few sort of strategies, kind of blanket strategies, and then we move on and I think that approach gets us really stuck in the negative. We just keep there, focused on the things that are hard, and so what I really wanted to do with this summit is take a fully neuroaffirming, strengths-based approach. So, yeah, we're validating that there are a lot of struggles and a lot of hard things, but we're leaning into what can we do? How do we use our kids' interests, their strengths, their talents, the things that they really gravitate toward, the things that light them up, to be able to help them to sort of counterbalance those struggles. Help them to sort of counterbalance those struggles. So, for instance, a lot of kids with ADHD are visual. We need to make a visual morning routine card for them, not just tell them all the things they need to do and expect it to get done right, like that's. Using a strengths-based approach, we're looking at how that kid's brain functions, what is their profile, which then helps us know where do we support, what kind of support would be helpful and what are we going to foster and nurture and really play up all those things that they're great at or that they're just interested in. It doesn't matter if they're great at them, but we can use what lights them up, because that's when their brain is fully online and working great, everything's working in harmony and things are the most doable. We're sort of maximizing doability by looking at it in this way, and it's just really I love doing these summits.

Speaker 2:

It's so exciting to be able to offer information like this for free, because it can be very expensive to have neurodivergent kids, and there's also, then, a paid option.

Speaker 2:

If you can't watch March 3rd through the 6th, then watch everything you want to.

Speaker 2:

You can purchase ongoing access bonuses from speakers. There's a workbook to really be able to tailor it, and I think that's one of the other really bright spots about the summit is that the information that's given to you is information that you can then take and tailor for your kid, because each kid with ADHD is individual. They might have the same diagnosis, but they have a different constellation of strengths and weaknesses and different needs and different interests, and so we need to be able to take the information that we get about helping kids with ADHD and figure out what does that look like for my kid? We talk a lot about regulation and emotional regulation in the summit, and you know what regulation exercises work for me or for my kid may not work for you or your kid, and so we're really mapping it out in a way that helps to also be able to apply it in your own family or in your own classroom. So I'm super excited about sharing it and, yeah, it's going to be fun.

Speaker 1:

It's going to be amazing. So it's March the 3rd to the 6th. I will put a link in the show notes so that if you're listening and you want to grab your place, as Penny said, it's for free. So it's going to be amazing, and I can't wait to listen to all the other experts and hear what they've got to offer as well. I know I'm going to learn. So so much, penny, thank you for your time today. I really have enjoyed talking to you and I'm sure at some point in the future we'll have to get you back on to talk a little bit more about neurodivergence and organizing, because you are such an amazing source of information.

Speaker 2:

It was a pleasure, as always. I love to chat with you and, yeah, I've had a lot of trial by fire. I've been in the trenches for a while, so I call it wisdom now.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Well, I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

Speaker 1:

It's always so fun talking to Penny and she is such a fountain of knowledge, or wisdom, as she says. And if you yourself have a child with ADHD or you have a friend or family member who has a child with ADHD, then please, please, send them the link for this summit. I know you will find it worthwhile. I'm part of the lineup for the summit talking about organizing with ADHD kids, and I've also created a really special bonus for anyone who buys a ticket. So, don't forget, you can click the link, it's completely free to join and I hope to see you there Until next time. And I hope to see you there Until next time. If you've enjoyed this episode, please send the link to a friend you know would appreciate it, subscribe and leave a review. I look forward to bringing you more organizing tips next time, but if you can't wait until then, you can go to my website or find me on Instagram, at carothor, or on Facebook at Caroline Organiser. Thanks for listening and I look forward to guiding you on your journey to find your clutter-free ever after.