How to get my 10 yr old aspie son to clean his room???

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I realize that he is 10 and doesn't care about his room, my thing is that he's broken his door, broke 2 beds( & yes we have a trampoline), holes in the wall so all the drywall is on the floor. He's very sneaky with food he brings in his room and he doesn't seem to care about throwing it away. Tried the hamper, waste baskets it just doesn't seem to work with him. However over the weekend I did get him to clean up a lot of the garbage & I picked up his clothes, I found that giving him several breaks to go outside to ride his bike or jump on the trampoline helped him a lot. We have to take out his broken bed frame today to bring in his new bed which will have no frame this time. That will help with hiding things under the bed. I want to thank everyone who posted it help knowing that I'm not alone. Thank you all!!

as far as the walls go, you could probably try panelling over top of the drywall....

The holes in the wall come from him trying to find the right spot to put his flashlight granted thats not an excuse as for the bed frames I don't know how he is breaking them. Maybe its because he's just rough on everything. Thank you for all the post and suggestions.

The right spot to put his flashlight? Lol, interesting. My son is rough on everything, as well, which is why we live with furniture that desperately needs to be replaced. Anything new will be trashed far too fast for us. I've told my son it's too bad we can't just build him a giant room with padded walls and a few things to climb on. He glows at the idea of having something like that! He's a pacer, and when he paces he climbs onto the furniture and slams the wall before turning around again. We're trying to set some reasonable limits on it, but it remains his best self-calming mechanism, so we don't feel it would be productive to work too hard against it.

Sigh. All part of the balancing act, isn't it?

I am glad to hear your son enjoys riding his bike. Was this difficult for him to learn, as it is for many Apsie kids? My son has the balance down, but just can't get stopping right, and for now he's given up. It's a shame, for I could see that being a positive way to release some of that energy.

I have a very good reason for keeping my room a mess - I literally can't find anything when its put away. Its the same with my paper organization system. In college, I never lost track of a paper UNLESS the professor required us to keep them in a binder/folder, all in order. Then I couldn't begin to find them. But allow me to put them all in one place, either in a folder, or stuffed into my notebook, and in the order I received them, I wouldn't lose a single one, and I could locate any one in seconds. My pile might be something like math paper 1, English paper 1, Science sylabus, English paper 2, Psychology paper 1, English 3. But I could find all 3 English papers without any effort. Make me put them in piles dedicated to subjects and I had to look through every single pile before I could locate english paper 2. And just getting it into the right pile was frustrating - thats just the way my brain works. But hey I'm college valedictorian and about to graduate from my master's with a 4.0 GPA so I must be doing something right.

Back on topic, my room is very cleary a mess. However, its an organized mess. I have my books/dvds in one corner, next to them are my old college books and the materials I'm going to study for the gre. Crafts are in, on and around my computer desk. My gameboy games are under the bed,, things I've bought but neer opened are piled in front of the dresser, things I'd like to do but don't think it wise to do with a cat in the room are behind my writing desk. Snacks are in my plastic file cabinet. Things that I need to throw away on garbage day are in front of the cabinet and in the unused spaces in my computer desk.

I think that I shall never see,
Aspie or NT
who being 10 years old
has a room that's ....ah never mind, I can't make it come out right. But a 10-year old with a clean room. Dreamer.

btdt

Thank you for this post!

I find comfort in knowing that we aren't alone! It has come to the point in our house that my husband actually removed doors and things that he could destroy when he was mad. Our son's response? "it looks bigger in here". Not a perspective I was expecting, but I was thankful for it because it was positive.

I have the parenting style that involves finding personal fulfillment out of giving my son things. I feel like I am doing something when often I can't "do' anything about his Asperger's but I am finding out that the extra stimulation around his room doesn't help him . So minimalistic and functional is now my goal.

My daughter, wh was just diagnosed today, is the same way. Since I am a slob, too, her father cleans her room for her weekly. No sooner is he done then she has turned it upside down again and thrown a fit for having moved her stuff in the first place.

Don't feel bad about your son's room being a mess. I'm 21 years old, in college and living in my own apartment and still need help from my mom to organize my place and figure out how and when to clean it. It just confuses and overwhelms me. She makes lists and gives me verbal directions to help. Some people just are like that. Oh, I'm an Aspie, by the way!

it is just hard to keep a room up to the standard of other people. i hate the sound of the vacuum. Dust in the air bugs me and touching a cold wet rag to keep dust out of the air creeps me out (i know warm water, by the time you are done dusting it is COLD), i can't wear plastic gloves (see reason of wet rag),

I do the thing with my papers where i organize them by when i got them... only i organize them using my legal pad for each class, so handouts stay in my notes where they should be.

My mother always wanted my room "organized." What she never quite got was that i could find everything in my room. Unless she went in and "cleaned" it. Then I was lost.

I removed the doors from my closet once.... because they were actually hampering me from getting to and putting away clothing... If i can't see something... i can't find it... i don't remember that i even have it half the time...

I line my walls with stuff... my bedroom has furniture (tables, file cabinets, shelves) all the way around it. So my room actually looks more cluttered than it is.

He sounds exactly like me at his age (other than the broken beds).

As for cleaning the room: when I made a mess (left toys on the floor, didn't put away clothes or puzzles), it was because I was way more focused on something else and just didn't have the time or the attention to worry about the thing I had previously been doing (you know, single-minded focus... doesn't leave room for remembering the last focus).
By the time I was told/forced to clean it, it had become an overwhelming task. There was so much overload that I didn't know where to begin. So I physically couldn't clean it.

Perhaps a good tactic would be to wait for a time, each and every day, when he is not completely focused on anything else - and then tell him it's time to do his daily room-cleaning? If you try it at a designated time, he may be busy with something else and not be able to stand dropping it. But if you do it every day, it won't become hugely overwhelming.

As for the food: I couldn't care less when my parents told me about mice and so forth. I don't know about you, but I think the best thing for me would have been a) permitting me to eat in my room - I did it because I wanted to eat in private and not be torn away from what I was doing, and then b) setting up a designated "procedure" for eating in the room (i.e., you must eat everything over a plate, you must immediately clean up any spills or crumbs, and as soon as you have finished eating/doing whatever you are doing, you must bring all your dishes to the sink and wash them).