Was learning to do laundry a challenge?

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hi all.'
My daughter Natalie (15-1/2) is almost to where she can do a load of laundry without needing me to be her consultant.

To take a pink shirt and have to decide whether it goes in to lights or darks is such a challenge. Reds go in dark after all and pink is just red and white mixed. The sorting process takes her forever.

I am wondering if any of you had a hard time figuring out how to "do" laundry.

Dawnie
NT Mom of 2 Aspie girls ages 15 and 12 and 4 other NT kids.

Last edited by Dawnie on 18 Sep 2007, 4:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I figured it out after ruining a couple of things. Great visuals.

hey i still dont know that, my cricket whites are currently very Grey ............ all my shirts are black that makes it a lot easer


i forget about my laundry a lot so its often gone through twice buy the time i take it out

I figured it out with no help at all.

It was easy for me to learn to do it. At my moms I just separate whites and darks, at dad's he just tells me what he wants to wash on an almost daily basis.

there are some tones i'm not quite sure of, though I've found with the exception of bright red it doesn't really matter if I put someting dark in with the lights, and it also doesn't matter if I put "hand wash only" items into the machine

I think it depends on the machine, too. I once had to use a machine that regularly tore tiny holes in my things. The agitator was too rough, I think.

I just did my first load of laundry in college, and I think the best thing to tell her is to not freak out. Maybe this is AS and maybe it isn't, but I obsess and second guess with every little thing I do (which is why I didn't go into math) and the thing that made my life so much easier was learning how to say "good enough". She can generally separate the lights from the darks, and that's all you really need.

I'm reminded of a book called "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for teens" and that plus a shrink and my mother's constant reassurance allowed me to be more self-reliant, knowing that if I mess up life will still go on. My parents still mess up sometimes, which is why my dad has bleach splattered pants and I have a sweater that wouldn't even fit my cat.

A suggestion I've seen for cheap graduation gifts is "laundry directions". You don't need her to graduate to map it out for her though. Just make a little "poster" by the machine that has the rules and the step-by-step directions. Even if she doesn't need them, it's comforting to have, and could be useful for your younger daughter in the future. Maybe create a spectrum from light to dark with a line separating what should go in the darks from what should go in the lights. If she had any questionable articles of clothing she could consult that. Generally there seems to be a rule that any colours except the palest of pastels go in the darks. My biggest issue is with the grays.

I don't know if any of this is useful, but I hope I've helped.

I mastered the laundry very quickly.

Tim

I still am not good at sorting the different colours. It takes me also a long time and in the end I end up stressed about it all. I am 16 by the way so not much older than your daughter.

I don't find it hard (especially since I wear dark clothes almost exclusively). The challenge is getting around to it often enough so that I don't run out of clothes.

At my house, there were always three bins: light, dark, and medium. Pink would go in the medium. Whenever I do my laundry (and it's not often), I usually have three, maybe four piles (it's a pretty small machine) : darkest, lightest, and one or two middle piles. I rarely have whites, so I wash my parents' clothes with them like once a month. When I was younger, I'd always look in the bin to see what was in it, the bins were labeled, but some weeks the mediums would be really dark or really light. I think you should definitely have more than 2 bins, especially if you want your whites to remain white, and they should be clearly labeled. I would also keep an article of clothing in the bin, or a colored label, to help remind them of the colors that go in there.

No need to sort if all of your colors are "dark".

My family always seperates our clothes into whites and colors and hell if I know where a pink shirt would go. I'd put it with the colors because whites are white and pink is not white.

I know how to use a washer and dryer, my mom's yelled at me a number of times about it. I have no idea how to seperate clothes, though.

I'm afraid to do laundry becauseI know I'll ruin things. XP

I never had trouble learning to do laundry, but would watch my parents and ask questions while they did laundry since I was very young and they would explain everything to me. By the time I was 12 I could, and sometimes did, laundry by myself. My siblings and I have sorted our own laundry and paired our own socks since we were little so that was almost like second nature. When we were learning about what goes in which load, it was simplified like this: if its denium or a heavy material it goes with the jeans, if it is white with no colors it goes in the whites, if it is white but with other colors then it goes with the lights, and if its all color and no white, except for very pale colors, then it goes with the darks. This help the sorting process.

Our washer freaks me out. It's really old, needs to be adjusted, and jumps around on the floor. This once caused the water pipe to come loose and we had a very unpleasant basement for about 2 weeks.

Aside from that, I can tell if things are extreme, but greys, pinks, and really light colors like orange, neon green, and bright yellow still confuse me.