Before you go ahead and read this post, let me tell you that I’m not a Mom and I certainly don’t know how to manage a home with kids living in it. But I was eight when my baby brother was born which has given me tremendous experience in keeping his room decluttered until he was old enough to do it by himself. For many years, his room had been a stack of junk – clothes, books, craft supplies, toys, etc. Honestly, I still wonder how Moms with two or more kids do it all along with a hundred other things.
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With kids at home, almost every corner of the house gets used to their stuff. But the place which is most prone to clutter is the kids’ room itself, with carpet becoming a permanent home for the toys, the walls becoming the canvas to paint their imagination on, the bed holding more clothes than the closet and every drawer getting stuffed up with things the kids can’t let go of.
With kids in house, you just eventually learn to get used to all the clutter they bring in. And this clutter needs to be managed more often than the rest of the house. So if you need some strategies to convert the room from cluttered to tidy, here are a few that can help:
1. Ask Your Kids To Participate
Kids are way smarter than you think, so much so that they can be very participative in decluttering their rooms. Even if they are 4 or 5 years old, they feel happy when invited to be involved in cleaning their drawers and arranging their toys. They love being helpful and are more aware about the stuff they own and where to keep them. All you need to do is work with them while they go about decluttering their room and within no time, they’ll make it a habit to keep it that way.
2. Make Them Choose Which Toys To Keep
It’s important to involve children in sorting out the stuff that needs to be kept and that what needs to be thrown out. Open the Toy Chest and make them get rid of the toys that they no longer play with or love. If they seem too reluctant to part with their stuff, ask them to donate what they don’t need and they’ll happily give it away with their own hands.
3. Divide The Kids’ Room Into Zones
Setting up proper zones for different activities and tasks will help minimize clutter to a large extent. You can divide the room into as many zones as you find suitable but it’s generally good to have at least four zones to start with. The first one should be for the toys and games, the second one for studying & reading, the third one for drawing & coloring and the last one for clothes and dressing. Setting up zones will help you create an organized system for managing the stuff and it will be much easier to declutter.
4. Rotate The Toys And Board Games
If you are a Mom, you would know how quickly kids get bored of toys and games. One day, they’ll be playing with puzzles and the Doctor set while the very next day, they’ll grab the dolls and teddy bears to play with. While it’s normal for kids to be moody, it can be hard for you to organize the whole bunch of toys lying across the floor. The best way to tackle this is to rotate their toys and games monthly or quarterly. Ask them to keep half of their toys with them and pack away the rest in a storage box until the next month.
5. Clothes Declutter
Children outgrow their clothes way faster than we can imagine which makes it important to keep decluttering their closet every now and then. Go through every piece of clothing and sort them out on the basis of what fits your child and what does not. Do the same for footwear and accessories and donate/sell what’s not needed anymore.
6. Books & Video Games Declutter
Most people find it hard to part with books and similar stuff. Being one of those people, I always make it a point to keep the ones that I love and might re-read later while donating or passing on the rest of them. Of course, the ones that I’m yet to read are properly kept arranged in the shelf until it’s time to store/donate them after I’ve read them.
Similarly, teenagers and even pre-teens are fond of video games which creates a further need to declutter them. It’s only wise that you go through your kids’ video games at least once a year and get rid of the ones that are old.
7. School Books And Artwork
As a kid, I was extremely fond of calligraphy and painting landscapes and even though I stopped painting at 12, I couldn’t get rid of my old artwork until the early twenties. Artwork and paintings hold a sentimental value for a lot of us which makes it difficult to part with them. And if you are a parent, it would be much harder for you to make your kids throw away the paintings and schoolwork that they created with so much love. In order to make it easier to declutter the school books and artwork, you can ask your kids to choose their most prized pieces while throwing away the ones they can do without.
To declutter the kids’ room is like entering a battle zone where you have to fight clutter on a regular basis. By the time you think of organizing their cupboard, they would have already outgrown the clothes. And just when you think that you have finally made space for their toys, they get some new ones to add up to their already large collection. I remember how my Mom used to wish for a power to stretch the kids up into adults within a second.
Are there any tips that you’d like to add to the list above? You can drop a comment below or write to me at hello@theaestheticabode.com.