Organizational skills are important for children to learn. Good organizational skills are life skills that stay with a child through adulthood. Keeping track of one's belongings is a good way for children to show responsibility.
The Naturally Organized Child
Some children are naturally organized. These children like their rooms neat and tidy, have a place for everything, and like everything in its place. With these children it is much easier to get them organized.
The Naturally Cluttered Child
Other children do not organize naturally. These naturally cluttered children may find it much more difficult to keep up with their belongings, impacting them at home, play, sports, and school. The disorganized child may develop the habit of running late, due to looking for lost items just to get out the door. They may also struggle at times in school, where work is lost or late and grades suffer.
Why Organization is Important
Organization is a basic life skill. The child who has trouble organizing may become the adult who struggles with organization. This can affect the adult's job performance, cause anxiety, and lead to important things slipping through the cracks. Even for children, learning to organize is important.
- Organizing, whether it be a room or a school binder, helps people to find things quickly. Knowing where an items belongs cuts down on delays when looking for something.
- Good organizational skills helps prevent losing things, at least from losing them often. Without a structure for keeping things, possessions can easily become lost, damaged or destroyed. Some children seem to lose everything. This can become a costly habit, and is at the very least irritating.
- Organization implies a certain level of respect for other people. Having a place for things show a respect towards others by being a good caretaker of items that may cost money to replace, such a library books or soccer cleats. A child who borrows a toy or book from a friend and does not keep track of it (usually through not being organized) shows a lack of respect for the property of that person. Also, unorganized children can waste the time and patience of family members through habitual wasting of time searching for items that should be easily accessed. How many parents have had to wait, running late, while their child hunted for shoes that should be in the closet, but mysteriously weren't?
Organization is an essential life skill that shows respect, creates order from chaos, and helps a child feel more secure knowing where things belong. Knowing why organization skills are important is a good first step. Teaching organizational skills is essential to transforming the cluttered child to the organized child.
Christine Alcott - Christine is an active homeschooling mother of 4 boys in Texas. She holds a BS in Mental Health and Human Services and a MTS in Theology ...
