Small Children, Big Messes: Organization Leads to Clean
Tips on Setting Your Child Up for Success
If things don't have a home, they're never going to be put away.
— Margie Feinberg, Denver-based professional organizer
From the kitchen in her home, Diana McHale can look into the adjoining children's playroom and see when things have gotten out of hand.
That’s when her children -- Eamon, 4, and Brendan, 2 -- have let the toys spill out of that room and into the rest of the house. “Eventually it will start creeping into the kitchen," said McHale of Denver, "and I’ll say, ‘All right, I can’t cook with these Legos at my feet.’ ”
Usually, though, with help from her husband, Padraic, the family keeps the toy situation under control. They have their own system: no toys – just books – in the children's bedrooms and a wealth of toy storage in the play area. And they keep the atmosphere lighthearted: “We sort of make it a game,” she said.
But occasionally, McHale said, she has to put her foot down when a toy can’t seem to find its home. She tells the the children she’ll pick it up, put it in a cabinet and leave it there for a week.
The key, she said, is choosing an ultimatum that she and her husband can follow through on. That balance must be accompanied by an understandable set of rules and a child-friendly system of organization.
Sort and Purge
Denver professional organizer Deanna Gusman (organizewithdeanna.com) says that the first step is to gather up the children and “de-clutter.” Go through the toys and determine what to keep, what to store, what to give away and what to throw away. “Many homes I work in simply need to be purged of the old before any cleaning can take place,” she said.
Margie Feinberg (margiefeinberg.com), another Denver professional organizer, said the goal is to keep only “what the kids need, use and love.”
Gusman suggested keeping a box on the floor of the closet and teaching children to put items in it that they have outgrown or no longer want. Those that have been overly loved may be thrown away, but toys and games still in decent shape may be donated to a charity. Some charities even come to your home to pick them up.
“It does so many good things,” Jim Fay, co-founder of the Love and Logic Institute of Golden, Colorado (loveandlogic.com), said about donating. “One, it keeps the clutter out. But there’s nothing better for your heart than to do something for somebody else.” Involving the children in picking the charity is an important part of the process.
Another way to lessen the clutter for young children is to rotate toys. Create an “annex” for toys that is out of sight of the children, Feinberg advised. Then, occasionally rotate these toys into daily use while moving toys that have been ignored but aren’t ready to be discarded into the annex.
This reduces the piles, and for young children the toys returned to the play area appear to be new, Feinberg said.
Find a Home
Once the sorting and purging is done, Feinberg said, the next step is finding a home for what remains. “If things don’t have a home, they’re never going to be put away,” she said.
Gusman advised determining the children's natural tendencies before settling on a storage method. “For example, determine if they prefer to hang clothes or fold them," she said, "and then set up a closet/dresser system that fits their tendencies."
A great choice for toy and game storage, Feinberg and Gusman agreed, involves separate bins or cubbyholes -- or both -- that can contain lots of small pieces or a few larger ones. Clear, shallow containers are best. “[Cubbies] are really ideal,” Feinberg said. “You put something in them, and you can see it.”
The worst solution? The time-honored toy chest. When the lid is closed, children can’t see what’s inside, and the toys are piled on top of each other, further disguising what’s within. And the lid, Feinberg said, is just another surface for a messy pile – “horizontal filing” is the term in the trade for stuff stacked on stuff, she noted, versus “vertical filing,” where items are separate and distinct.
When Feinberg’s son and daughter were young, she and a friend built a wall unit of cubbyholes with a plastic bin in each. Now that her children are out on their own, she has “repurposed” the bins with the new content label (“laundry,” for example) facing out and the old label on the back of the bin.
Such storage now is widely available in modular systems, Feinberg said.
The payoff for teaching children to put away their toys and clothes is more than a cleaner house. Feinberg noted that the ability to organize becomes increasingly important as children grow and as other tasks -- such as homework assignments and, eventually, careers -- enter the picture.
- Photo Credit Jen Siska/Lifesize/Getty Images Martin Poole/Lifesize/Getty Images Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
