I remember the first time I moved houses in my adult life. We called some older, adultier friends over to help us move. I don’t remember all the specifics, but I know one of them asked us if we were totally packed and ready, and I confirmed that yeah, we just needed help grabbing stuff and moving it. (The new house was 1 mile down the street!)
When they got to our house, he said exasperatedly, “you’re not packed and ready at all!” and began throwing loose bits and pieces that were left around into a trash bag.
He wasn’t wrong: there were things left around. It’s just that my mental picture of “finished” looked different than his mental picture of “finished”.
In my mind, moving always entailed having some random stuff left over that you didn’t know where it went and you had to throw in a backpack. Maybe some stuff left in drawers and you stacked the drawers in your front car seat. Whatever. That’s just what the process of me moving to college, moving between dorms to other dorms (just down the hall), and moving out of the dorms and into an apartment had looked like.
In his mind, being ready to move meant that literally every object in the house was already in a container of some sort, and that the containers were ready for someone else to come in and grab.
For some reason, the thought of putting all the tiny little odds and ends — “junk drawer” stuff — into a box or a bag felt truly weird to me. It wasn’t in my mind as a step in the process. I didn’t know how to get to “finished”, so I called it “finished” when it looked to me like I’d done everything, but it didn’t look that way to someone else.
Sometimes kids (or people of all ages) have trouble with this in other walks of life, too. Kids might get in trouble at school for not finishing their work. They’re happily working on it to the best of their ability and then when it’s 90% done it’s like they just can’t get it the rest of the way.
I run into mental blocks with big projects in this way, too. Writing the last 1/10 of an evaluation for work is either the easiest (if I have momentum) or the hardest (if I can’t picture what “finished” will look like). Sure, I know what it literally looks like — a stack of paper — but usually the last section for me is to make recommendations for the child I’m evaluating, and if my brain is buzzing with general recommendations but I can’t think of what would best help this specific child, I might just get stuck. I sometimes do this with leisure activities. I’ll draw 90% of a picture and then be like “ughhh I want to be done now”, my brain can’t picture what little pieces would need to be added to reach “finished”.
Many of these are open-ended for me. When they’re closed-ended, when “finished” is concrete in some way, we can use that knowledge to help our kids. You could make a visual example of what paper turned in to the “turn it in” bin in the room looks like; you could show what a paper with three written sentences on it will look like; you could hold up an example of what a completed project will look like. Or you could take the finished concept and verbally break it down. “We’re writing a story, and we’ll know it’s done when it has one sentence to tell the beginning, one sentence to tell the middle, and one sentence to tell the end.” “We’re cleaning up this room, and we’ll know it’s clean when we have put all the Legos in that green bin, and all the clothes in the laundry.”
And if it’s open-ended, I think we can model how to think about that, or how to take steps toward “finished”, or how to evaluate if it’s finished yet and decide how to move forward. “I know when I’ve got three sentences I’ve definitely got at least the minimum. As I’m reading them back, I’m wondering if there’s any more to the story in my head I want to tell?” “I’m looking at this room and trying to think if there’s anything else I want to clean while I’m already in motion. Maybe I could put all the stuffed animals in one place so there’s more room on the floor to play?”
