Clean up this mess! Or don’t? Advice from an expert

In this episode of In It, hosts Gretchen Vierstra and Rachel Bozek welcome author and therapist KC Davis. KC is a therapist who hosts the podcast Struggle Care. Her new book Who Deserves Your Love will be out in May 2025. She is also the best-selling author of How to Keep House While Drowning.  

KC talks about being a “messy” person and reasons why we could all benefit from caring a little less about messiness. She offers tips for getting your home to “work for you.” And she helps us understand reasons to care less about the mess.

We love hearing from our listeners. Email us at init@understood.org.

• Messy room? How to help your child keep it neat

• Why kids with executive function challenges have trouble starting tasks

• Listen: ADHD and messiness (Jeannie’s story)

• My Home Is Messy, and I Don’t Feel Bad About It (KC in The New York Times)

(3:08) What makes us special can also be what makes us scattered

(4:41) The tendency to be messy

(5:52) Identifying solutions

(7:32) Executive function and home management

(10:18) The steps involved in a task

(11:20) Helpful tips

(14:28) Focusing on function

(16:37) How you talk about mess

Gretchen: Hello and welcome to "In It," a podcast for families with kids who learn and think differently.

Rachel: Here you'll find advice, camaraderie, stories of successes, and yes, sometimes failures from experts and from parents and caregivers like you.

Gretchen: I'm Gretchen Vierstra, a former classroom teacher and an editor here at Understood.org.

Rachel: And I'm Rachel Bozek, a writer, editor, and mom who has definitely been in it. Today, we're talking about messiness. Messy rooms, messy habits, all of the mess.

Gretchen: And how maybe it's on us to care less about the mess rather than putting it on our messy kids to care more.

Rachel: Joining us to talk about this is KC Davis, who wrote the 2022 bestseller, "How to Keep House While Drowning."

Gretchen: She's also a therapist and hosts the podcast, "Struggle Care."

Rachel: Earlier this year, KC wrote a great piece for the New York Times called "In Defense of Messiness," and her insights into her own lived experiences as a quote-unquote messy person, give her a unique understanding of what's going on with kids who make a mess.

Gretchen: She also has a ton of practical tips built around the idea that, as she puts it, you don't work for your home, your home works for you.

Rachel: So, KC, welcome to "In It."

KC: Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Rachel: We're so glad to have you here. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. As you know, we're talking today about kids' messy rooms and the feelings that we have as adults about messy rooms. The shame, the guilt, the fear that someone might unexpectedly show up. That is a big one for me, and judge us for the mess.

So, maybe a way to get into all of those feelings would be to talk about the article that you recently published in The New York Times with the title, "In Defense of Messiness."

KC: Yes.

Rachel: I loved it. And what I really wanna talk about are the photos that accompanied that article. So, could you first just kind of talk about what we see in those photos, and what you see in those photos, and kind of how they make you feel?

KC: Plastered in The New York Times? Yeah, so it is a picture of my like living room, dining room, and it's very messy. You can see my commercial-sized open trash can on wheels. I think that there's also a picture with my bedroom with our like bedding all over the place and all of our dirty clothes on the floor.

You know, I've been posting my house on TikTok for so long that I'm kind of used to like showcasing my space. So, I didn't feel that different about that, but I was like, oh, those are big pictures. But I had such fun writing that article because I talk a lot about how, you know, messiness is not a moral failing. But I don't talk as much about like kind of in celebration of messiness.

KC: And my favorite paragraph to write was talking about how not all of us can be Marie Kondo's closet because some of us are Albert Einstein's desk.

Rachel: Yes. Right.

KC: And so, just this idea that what makes us special can be the same thing that makes us kind of scattered.

Gretchen: How did you get to this place? Because I feel like ingrained in society is that being neat is the way to go, and means that you've got your life together.

KC: Yeah, I think two things. The first is, I went to drug rehab when I was 16 years old, had a pretty severe drug addiction. And I also was selfish and irresponsible and messy and never did my homework and was failing out of classes and didn't shower enough and didn't take care of my body. And all these kinds of things all wrapped into one. And I was committed to inpatient for like a year and a half.

And while I was there, I did a lot of emotional work and got over the addiction and became a really healthy person emotionally and psychologically. And the structure of the place that I was living had me showering every morning and learning how to clean things and learning to be tidy and learning do all these things, and being up at a certain time. And when I got out, I continued that journey of being emotionally healthy and seeing therapists, and growth.

But it was like 48 hours before I was like sleeping in, leaving my stuff everywhere.

Gretchen: Right.

KC: And I think that like, just as that went on, it just became obvious like, "Oh, these things weren't connected." Like, yes, I need to take care of myself. Yes, I needed to be able to function in my space.

But like my tendency to be messy came right back when the structure wasn't there to force me to be like neat and tidy all the time. And it just kind of clued me in like, "Oh, this isn't a moral problem. This isn't an irresponsibility problem." I was extremely responsible, you know, in my early 20s. So, I think that was my first clue, you know.

But I think the other part was, you know, fast forward to having a couple of young kids and I'm feeling overwhelmed because everything is messy and I can't keep up and, you know, there's no clean laundry, there's clean dishes, and things are gross and dirty. And the amount of times that I tried, you know, I read the Marie Kondo book. I read "The Home Edit." I tried to do these systems and they never worked for me. And I finally realized that I was choosing systems that were very much working against my brain.

Like they weren't systems built for messy people. And I think that that was kind of the second part was now that I've sort of created these systems for myself, I realize A: nothing wrong with me. B: I can have a perfectly functional home as long as I sort of work with who I am and what my tendencies are and then create systems around that.

Rachel: Tell us a little bit more about how your brain works and how you kind of figure out your systems and like, you know, what I would call like tricks or hacks because like identifying some of these solutions, I feel like a lot of people, myself included, have trouble just figuring that part out.

KC: Yeah. So, I have ADHD, and a lot of executive functioning is affected by that. So, your executive functions are things like time management, working memory, breaking things into steps, flexibility, there are other things there.

But like working memory is a big one for me because, and it got really bad when I had kids, because let's say I got the milk out because someone asked for milk and I'm pouring it, but now they're asking for a Band-Aid because they're hurt. So, I put the milk down and I go get the Band-Aid and I take the paper off of it and I put it on there. And while I'm doing that, I'm walking by the laundry room and I see that like, oh yeah, I gotta go in there and get that laundry done. So, I go over to start doing the laundry.

So, like, I just kind of ping pong around tasks when I get visual reminders to them. And then the next time, you know, 20 minutes later, I walk into the kitchen and I see that that milk is there still. And when it wasn't in my visual field, it almost like ceased existing to me. So, that's a big part of messiness. And so, if I really focus on put everything back as soon as you use it, I could pull that off for a day, but I'll be exhausted.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, why do you think things like putting toys away, or folding laundry, or doing dishes are so hard for many people? So, including people who don't have ADHD, why are these particular types of tasks hard?

KC: So, your executive functions, everyone has executive functioning, and your executive functioning can be compromised by a ton of different things. It can be things like ADHD or autism or depression or anxiety, but it's also exhaustion, burnout, stress, being too hungry, being in pain, being...like all those things can sort of compromise those executive functions.

I always like to say like it's not hard for me to fold laundry, it is hard for me to start folding laundry.

Gretchen: Right.

KC: And so, a lot of advice around home management is all about like just do a little as you go. The reason that doesn't work for me and people like me is because the part I get stuck on is making the decision and initiating the action to go do the laundry. It's the same thing with picking up. Like, I actually don't hate the process of like tidying up, but for my brain to not feel like you are asking it to put its hand on a hot stove, it needs to be its own separate activity where I don't focus on other things.

OK, I want an hour and a half. I wanna focus only on tidying. I wanna put on my playlist. I need to have on like the right kind of clothes. I need to kind of psych myself into like, "This is what we're doing." Like the way, like imagine when you need to go to the gym and you're not somebody who's just like, "Yeah, let's go to the gym." Like you really have to kind of like psych yourself into it.

Gretchen: Right.

KC: That's how it feels. Once I get moving, I'm fine. But I wanna do that once a week on a Sunday afternoon and get the whole house put back together. I don't wanna do it 18 times a day because it takes the same amount of psyching myself up and motivation and energy and attention to put one thing away as it does to put 23 things away.

Gretchen: I love this topic because I am the person who tidies like non-stop. And sometimes, you know, people are like, "Just sit down and stop tidying," you know. But I have a child who does the dishwasher thing. The plate is on the table, they're eating, then they get up, and it's still there, and the dishwasher is right there, and it could be put in there. And when I've asked why, I've gotten, I'm so busy thinking about what I have to do next, that I don't do it. And I'm like, "Well, I got homework to do, so screw this plate. I got to get in my room and start my homework."

And it's been so hard for me to watch and understand and not be a nag about, because I'm just like, "But it's so simple." But what you're saying about the emotional drain of just adding that task nonstop all day, I mean, that's just so enlightening.

KC: Yeah, and it's also to do with how many steps. Like that is simple to you. But to me, there are multiple steps. There is, OK, I'm done eating, so I have to readjust my attention and focus. I have to exercise delayed gratification, which is not a skill children or teenagers have, right?

Gretchen: Right.

KC: I have to get up, walk over to the dishwasher. I have to pull out the rack. I'll have to find a place to put it. God forbid there's no easy place because now there's about nine other different steps, right? I gotta put it in there, shut it, close it.

Rachel: You might have to wipe it off into the garbage if there's food on the plate. I mean, I just found like five more steps.

KC: Yeah, so the key is that for things like that, I have to make things shorter steps because there are some things I can't do once a week, right? I would have roaches, right, if I do that once a week. But when I first started to tackle the fact that I left dishes everywhere, because again, I'm not saying, well, my natural state is to leave dirty dishes everywhere, so let's celebrate it, who cares?

Gretchen: Right.

KC: Me and my family deserve to be in a sanitary home, right? And to have clean dishes. There's a couple of different things you could do. One is you could the dishes go in the sink. That's it. No other steps. Because that's better than all around the house. Dishes go in a sink, and then every day when you get home and you walk in, the first thing you do are all those dishes. Because again, then it's one decision, you're fully focused on that activity, and it's done.

So, a lot of people go, "OK, the rule is you only eat in the kitchen." And I'm like, "OK, back it up. You've got to make these on-ramps way smaller. What if the rule was when you eat in a kitchen, you use the real dishes? But if you eat anywhere else in the house, you take a paper plate, because then you can eat and throw it away?" And I'm not saying that has to be the rule forever, but right now, when we want to try, we wanna try and make the smallest change that is the closest to our natural inclination to action as possible.

So, like, I take my clothes off and drop them where they are, and I'm done. Because think about it, when are you ever changing clothes? It's always in preparation to do something else. And my brain's going a million miles an hour. I am onto that next thing. Well, it doesn't mean just live with your clothes on the ground, unless that doesn't bother you. But what if it meant there needs to be a laundry basket in every room of my house? Because now, no matter where I am at my house, I'm never more than two steps away from being able to chuck something down into a laundry basket.

That means that, when I walk by and I noticed now there's too many clothes on the floor and I am starting to feel anxious or it's a little unusable, it's easy for my brain to go "Pick it all up and put it right there, right there. You don't have to walk it to the laundry basket. You don't have to walk to the laundry room. Whoop, done."

Gretchen: So, do you have a laundry basket in the kitchen?

KC: Yeah. Oh, 100%. Dish towels.

Gretchen: Oh yeah, true.

KC: You gotta find those bottlenecks. So, for me, you'll notice in my pictures in The New York Times, you can tell by looking that my messes, they are messes from recent use.

Gretchen: Right.

KC: So, yeah, you couldn't just sit down at my dining room table right now and eat because there's a bunch of boxes on it. However, the only difference is I'm cleaning up the table so that we can sit down, you're cleaning up the table after you ate at it.

Gretchen: Right. Right.

KC: Like we're both doing the same thing. There's no like morally superior like when to clean the table, right? We're both sitting down at a clean table to eat. It's just that my brain, because of the urgency and the novelty and the challenge, my brain goes, "I need to eat, let's take this stuff off, no big deal. I can gear that up quick because I wanna eat." But after I've eaten and I've gotten my reward, there is no reward to then cleaning up the table.

Gretchen: Right.

KC: So, my brain struggles to kick that into "Let's go."

Rachel: So, how do you figure out which of these household chores and tasks should be a priority and which you can maybe let go of without feeling maybe shame or being critical of yourself or your kids?

KC: So, one big thing is that we first have to distinguish why we feel like something needs to be fixed. And my key to that is I want us to focus on function. Do I feel like my bed needs to made every morning because there's a functional reason that that bed needs be made? Or do I just feel like that's what adults do and one time my mom made me listen to that YouTube about the general that said, if you didn't make your bed every morning, you couldn't do anything.

You know what I mean? We have a lot of these moralizing ideas about why things should be the way they are. And the first thing to recognize is maybe I don't care about some of these things, and maybe that's OK. So, let's think about that with our kids. Do I need my kids to clean up their toys after they use them, or clean up every day before they go to bed, because there is a functional reason why they could not use their playroom if they didn't do that? Or is it just because I feel anxious looking at that mess? Or I feel like that's the way you're supposed to do it?

You don't have to do things you're supposed to around your home unless there's a functional reason for you. And so, I think with kids, it is important for us to teach them the skills to create functional spaces. But I always wanna attach it to the functionality. So, when my kids were really little, when they were like two and four, I don't have arbitrary rules about "You have to clean up the playroom every night or every three days" or whatever.

But I would wait until one of them tripped over their toys or couldn't find something or didn't have room to play, and I'd go, "Wow, well, it seems like we don't have enough room in here. Let's clean this up so that we have room to play." And you connect it to that function, and that's actually easier for kids because if they don't have that delayed gratification. So, you're saying, well, "But if you clean it up tonight, then you'll be happy tomorrow." Well, that doesn't mean anything to children.

But if we start talking about, "Well, if you wanna make this puzzle, we're gonna have to clean up real quick because there's not enough room," that's actually an easier connection for them to make. They'll be more motivated to do that. And then they're connecting, "Oh, I'm doing this not because it's supposed to look this way, but because I can't play, I can use my space if I don't do this."

And the other thing is like, pay attention to how you talk about mess. Because a lot of us as adults, the number one problem I hear is "I can't relax if anything's out of place. I can't, I'm overwhelmed if it's too messy" and it's not about it being functional to use, it's just about the anxiety we have and that comes from the cultural messaging and where that starts is think about it, if the only time you're ever talking about mess around your kids is when you are frustrated, when you're angry there's a mess, when you getting onto them for there being a mess.

And so, like I made it a point to talk about when a mess might not be functional and how we can do about it, but also to walk into that playroom and go, "It is so messy in here. You guys must be having so much fun." Like, I don't want them to have this belief that something's wrong if something is messy. Because I don't want them to grow up and not be able to come home after a hard day of work and look at the laundry and go, "I'll do that later, I just wanna sit down and relax."

I don''t want them see a mess and immediately think, "I feel like something's not right and I'm not doing the right thing" because all of that comes from the programming that we get from our family and from society and I think that we can hopefully help not do that to our kids.

Gretchen: I love that.

KC: You start with like, does this matter on a functional level?

Rachel: That's come up with the room cleaning here where like, I'll say, "OK, it doesn't have to be like Marie Kondo neat, but if we're late for practice because you can't find a shirt that I definitely put where it's supposed to go, that's where I feel like if I had to kind of find where my line in the sand is, it's like, well, now we're like affecting other people, right? So, maybe somebody is picking you up for practice and you're not ready because you can't find the thing you need." That's the difference for me.

KC: Yeah, well, that's a functional reason, right? Like you have to be considerate to the people around us. But the difference would be, instead of saying, "Because of this, you have to keep your room clean," because that's how you would deal with it. Instead, it's trying to figure out what is important for them and getting their buy-in for the system. Because the part that I heard about that is that if there is a piece of clothing that's important to know where it is, well, the part of that system is you putting it in their room with all of their other clothes.

Maybe if he knows or she knows that there's one article of clothing that I need to keep track of, maybe they don't wanna keep it with all of the clothing that they know is going to be sort of tossed in a pile or something.

Gretchen: Yeah.

KC: You know what I mean? That's not where I keep the things that I need to know, because my laundry is always kind of in a perpetual state of jumbledness.

Gretchen: Yeah, I will tell you that I came to this realization. So, as we all, as I said, I am the tidyer. I am very neat. And I would have a daily heart palpitation walking into my teenage daughter's room. And I was trying systems, and none of the systems worked. And then finally, one day she was just like, "I know it bothers you, but it doesn't bother me." "But how can you find anything?" And she's like, "I know exactly. where everything is. So, like when you come in and you mess around and you start tidying, now I don't know where those things are."

Rachel: That's me. I know where everything in my pile is.

Gretchen: That's my daughter. She doesn't miss homework assignments. She has good grades. So, like "OK, I guess you don't need a neat desk in order to do all your work." But it took a lot for me to get there. So, I don't know if you have any advice. I could have gotten there sooner. I don't just mean people listening to this podcast will get there sooner, but like... I really don't go in there that often because I don't want to be tempted to say something.

KC: The options aren't like overmanage or do nothing or say nothing, right? Because it's about moving into a support, like how can I support you and what matters to you? So, something I said earlier was that the effort to put everything back right after I use it is more stress and energy than the stress and the energy it takes to just deal with having something be messy.

Gretchen: Yeah.

KC: But that doesn't mean that there isn't sometimes a part of me that wishes it was a little less messy. It's just that on a cost-benefit scenario, it doesn't rise to the point of overtaking the energy or stress it would take to deal with it. So, when we ask, so, "Well, I know where everything is." OK, is there anything about your space that if you didn't have to do it, if a fairy could come in and do it you feel like would make getting ready in the morning a little easier, or would make doing homework a little easier, or would you enjoy your space a little more?

"OK, well, I guess if a fairy came in and did it, I guess it would be nice if I had a little more space when I did want to sit down to do something." OK, so that's where we go in with that and go, "OK, so how can we support there?" And it's not, we don't start with changing their habits. We start with change in the environment.

So, do you need a bigger desk? Can we get you a box that is like paper-sized so that if you sit down, you wanna use your desk, it takes you two seconds to just take all the papers and put them in the paper box. You don't need to organize them, file them away, look through; just get them out quickly. Do you want a bigger laundry basket? Do you wanna a full-size trash can? Like, where are the bottlenecks? Right? Do we need baskets for our clothes instead of folding them up and putting them in the drawer?

Gretchen: Yeah.

Rachel: I think also a lot of these suggestions could be really helpful for kids as they, um, you know, after high school, if they're going to be living with a roommate, whether they're out away at college or just like out on their own at some point, and there is this other person to think about, right? And so, maybe you're a Rachel and your roommate is a Gretchen and…

Gretchen: We'd be great roommates.

Rachel: We're going to be great roommates as long as I have some baskets. I think it is a really great thing for them to start to kind of understand just also, you know, because there is maybe another person in the scenario, whether it's your partner or your spouse or your roommate, and like, you know, they might have a very different experience when they walk in the door and see a pile.

KC: Yeah, and I think when I grew up, like I became a responsible person, the difference was caring about how I impacted others.

Rachel: Yeah.

KC: When I was younger, it's roommates getting upset with me because I'm always leaving my dishes in the sink and things like that. When I was older, I didn't become a tidy person, but it was like, there were areas where I have to expend my energy here. Something will be done so that I am not imposing upon the people I live with, and imposing from a functional sense. So, if they just don't like to see the toaster on the counter, tough. Like, but you can't access the sink because of my dishes? That matters.

Rachel: Right. Yeah.

KC: So, and I think that's a big deal. Like we always think about the person who has the lower or like let's say, has a higher tolerance for mess as being the one that is morally obligated to get closer to the person that has the like low tolerance for a mess. And I don't think that that's the case. Like I could think of nothing more miserable than feeling as though I could never relax in my home.

Gretchen: Yeah.

KC: On either side, right? And so, I think it's about respecting that there has to be some compromise in the middle. I say this to moms a lot that are like, "I feel like I can't relax unless things are clean."

Gretchen: That's me.

KC: Yeah, and we talk about having a spot in your house that you can sit down and relax. And it's like, "Yeah, but I can see the living room, I can't sit it down."

And I remember just being like, "Turn the chair around. Like find a window with a pretty view, turn the chair around. That's your corner. That's the corner you keep clean and dusted, and no one's allowed in there, right? Whether it's that corner or whether it's your bedroom or whether there's a seating area where you go, this is Mom's corner. If you come in here, you will keep it immaculate because this is the space that matters to me. This is the place I need to go to sit down and relax and not have to think about what needs to be done."

Just like I might need a space in my house where I get to go and take off my clothes and not think about where I'm throwing them, and get out of bed in the morning and not thinking about if it's made, like that kind of stuff.

Gretchen: This has been so interesting.

Rachel: Thank you for all of this.

Gretchen: Yes. Thank you so much.

KC: Thank you.

Rachel: Thanks so much for listening today. If you have any thoughts about the episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at init@understood.org.

Gretchen: And check out the show notes for this episode, where we have more resources and links to anything we mentioned.

Rachel: This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you'd like to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.

Gretchen: "In It" is produced and edited by Julie Subrin with additional production support from Cody Nelson and Samiah Adams. Justin D. Wright mixes the show, and Mike Ericco wrote our theme music. Briana Berry is our production director. Neal Drumming is our editorial director.

Rachel: From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Thanks for listening.

Gretchen: And thanks for always being in it with us.