Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - The Secret to Organizing Kids Toy Clutter | Clutterbug Podcast # 24

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

After years of struggling with toys everywhere, I finally found the holy grail of toy organizing systems.  You will NEVER have to pick up your children's toys again...really! I want you to give this organizational system a try, if only for a week, just to see the amazing results for yourself!      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome back to the Clutterbug Podcast. Today I wanted to talk about kids and kids clutter and the fact that so many people complain or come to me asking for advice on how to get their kids to clean up or how to get their kids from stopping, making these giant house totaling messes. And I've had a lot of clients. I've had hundreds of clients here in my community and all of the homes that I go to that are really struggling with clutter, the parents almost always blame the children. They're always like, well, my kids are so messy and I'm tired of picking up after my kids and my kids don't put things back where they belong. And I'm going to totally be like maybe insulting people here, but I have to say this, your kids, the way that they behave and treat their belongings

in your home is your responsibility. I mean, that's your job to teach them. to not only pick up, but to also, you know, respect your home. And then when they grow up, hopefully they carry that along with them and respect their home. Now, I'm not talking about being some crazy militant person that is constantly yelling at your children to pick up or anything like that. But I do think that it is important to teach children to respect their possessions. And what I mean by this is, you know, not throwing their brand new clothes that you just bought them or any of their clothing in piles on the floor or you know tossing their their nice toys in a toy box all jumbled together where parts are getting broken and lost this stuff costs money and clothes cost money

toys cost money and maintaining your home costs you money and i think it's really important that that kids understand that they have to be respectful of you your belongings and your money and while they're living in your house, even though it's their room and it's their stuff, it's your house. And so it's about setting boundaries. So let's talk about that. And I'm in no way like a mean mommy. I'm not one of those moms that's like, this is my house and you'll abide by my rules at all. So I don't want to give you that impression. And I'm also not even going to pretend for a second that my house is always cleaned and tidy. But thankfully, we do. have really minimal like kid clutter or if they do make a mess when they play because kids play

and they they spread their toys out and they have a great time it only takes a few minutes for them to pick it up instead of having to you know dedicate a Saturday to cleaning up kids toys and I want to talk about the reason why why that is that it's easy for my house to stay kid clutter free despite having three kids in my own and I really learned that the little tips and tricks when I ran a daycare so I had a daycare out of my home for six years and at one point I had nine kids every day two of which were babies and I I struggled I tried everything to to manage the toys and what would happen was I would spend you know an hour each night putting everything back and then the next day by like 10 o'clock in the morning, it was completely trashed again. And I mean, eventually you give up.

Eventually, you're just so sick of picking up after your children that you just give in to the mess because it's either that or go crazy. But I want to tell you that there is another option. I mean, it's not just constantly cleaner. Be crazy. There's a third option, my friends, I promise you. And that third option is to have organizing solutions that really work for children. And you are going to have to make a small investment in some shelving and in some baskets. But if you're short on time and short on cash, you can recycle diaper boxes. You can use other like bins that you already have in your home. And you can really find inexpensive shelving units like on Craigslist or here in Canada,

we use Kijiji or my favorite place to shop is Facebook, local Facebook online yard sale swaps. So that is the two things that you're really going to need. You're going to need some bins or baskets and some shelving. And what you want to do is you want to sort the kids' toys into like items. So all of their cars go in a car bin, all of their Lego goes in a Lego bin, all of their Barbies go in a Barbie bin. You're getting the idea. All their puzzles go together.

and you're going to label the outside of that bin. Now really, here's the key. You only want your kids to have access to a few of those bins at a time. And this is called toy rotation. Eventually, you're not going to have to, once they get used to this, you're not going to have to, you know, remove most of their toys from their space. But in the beginning, toy rotation is key to training your kids. Like you train a puppy to go pee outside and not on your carpet.

You also have to train your children not to dump every single toy that they own on your living room floor and make snow angels in it. That is not how we respect our belongings. That isn't great. So we as parents have to train our children. And you know what? Some of us haven't been trained ourselves. Our parents didn't teach us. So how could we possibly have the skills to pass that down?

So I'm just going to give it to you. I'm going to let you know that I learn. learned through failure. Epic failures. I tried so many different organizing systems and solutions, and I've read countless organizing books until I stumbled upon this method. And I promise you, it is the holy grail of toy organization. And once you adapt this method, you will not have to pick up your kids' toys ever again. I promise you, I know that's a really bold statement, but I hold to that. If you follow these steps, your toy clutter will be a thing of the past.

So step one is to sort the toys into like bins. And you want all of these bins to be not a huge like rubber made tote. You want the kids to be able to pick up and move this bin easily. So I would say one foot by one foot bin is the max size that you want. So IKEA's organizing cube shelf, those size bins is the maximum. size that you want. You also don't want those bins to be too small where they can't hold anything and you've got like 15,000 that you need in order to hold all their toys. So I really like the idea of having like the large dollar store dollar tree totes are a perfect size. The IKEA cube shelving totes

or any of the closet made cube shelving totes, you know, those canvas fabric totes are the perfect size. So you want to sort their toys into all of these bins and you're probably saying like what do you do about the big? What do you do about, you know, the big giant, I don't know, kitchen sets and the playhouses and all of that? That's stuff that we're going to deal with later. So we're going to push that to the side. First, we're going to sort the smaller things into like items.

And then we need, when you see, you know, how many bins you have. Now it's time to get a shelf to hold them. Now, you don't have to hold all of them. I would say max you want maybe six to be out that the kids can access at any time. And the rest, I want you to put away. I wanted you to make sure that all of these bins are clearly labeled on the front as to what is inside so the kids don't have to dump it out to see. Clear bins really work too, but I love just big paper labels. You can laminate them or you can use clear packing tape to attach it to the front.

Usually what I do is I laminate the labels and I hot glue them to my fabric bin. Hot glue works. It's perfect. It works great. Staple them on. It doesn't really. Duck tape. It doesn't matter. but you really have to label the bin so the children know what's inside. Use pictures if they can't read yet.

And then you want to get some shelving that will hold maximum six of these bins. And the rest you put in your closet, you shove under your bed. Who knows? You have a spot in your garage. You want to hide. You want to hide the rest of the toys. And this may seem harsh. And you may think, oh, what are my kids going to play with?

Or it's limiting their creativity. It's, you know, they're not going to be able to have as much fun. I promise you, I promise, promise that this is not true. When you give children less toys, less toy options, what you're going to find is they're going to have to use their imagination more. They're going to have more fun because they're not overwhelmed. They're not overstimulated by the amount of stuff that they can play with. They're going to be much more engaged in the toys that they actually have. It's way easier to find what they want. It's much, much easier for them to clean up. but the best part of toy rotation, and that's what this is called, is when you switch out those bins,

when you switch those six bins for new six bins and put the other six bins away, maybe you do this every week, maybe you do this every month, you are going to see your kids thinking it's Christmas morning all over again. They have forgotten about those toys that you've put away. And when you bring them out, it's like new toys all over again. what really eliminates that boredom that kids can feel. You know, kids are like, oh my gosh, there's nothing to play with, there's nothing to play with. That's because they see these toys every day, day in and day out. But when you use rotation, you remove the toys from their site for a week or two

and then bring them back in while removing the toys that they've been playing with. They're rejuvenated. They want to play with them all over again, and they're excited, and they love their toys. So this method, I promise you, it works. Now, if you're still having trouble where the kids are, you know, they only have access to maybe six bins and they're still dumping them all out and they're mixing all the toys together, then you have to be a little harsher and go to the one bin at a time rule. So you can only play with one bin at a time. When you're done, you must clean that up before you get another bin or you're grounded from the toys. and it will not take long for your kids to really get in the habit of, oh man, you may have to

remind them in the beginning, I have to clean up this bin before I get another bin, but because it's such a small amount of toys in that bin, it will take them just a minute, a minute to pick them up and throw them back into the bin. So they're going to see that cleaning up their toys isn't a big deal. It isn't this time-consuming horrible thing that they have to complain about, and they really get in the habit of just doing it when they're done playing. Once you see that they're consistently picking up the toys when they're done, then allow them to have two bins at a time or three bins at a time until eventually you don't have to worry about really micromanaging how they're playing. But that's it. That is the secret. And I've had so many

new daycare kids coming in and out. And we are the house where every neighborhood kid comes right now as I'm recording this podcast. I have my three children plus six other neighborhood kids. over and they're playing in the living room and all of them have been able to adapt to our bin rule and so yes they play with the toys yes they make a mess but they also are able to clean them up independently without me having to even ask or be in there and you know show them in handhold and it was very easy to teach and show even neighborhood new kids coming in all the time so I definitely wanted to share that with you my my secret I know I've talked about it before and I feel like I'm beating a dead horse but I see so many people still

asking me this question or still saying you know I'm drowning in toys what can I do and I want you if you're if you're you're not sure if you're thinking you're not really trusting that that's going to work or if you've used a version of this before in the past and it hasn't really worked I want you to give it another try I want you to really embrace toy rotation minimal toys using separated bins with labels with some sort of shelving unit, I want you to give it a go for just a week and really give it a go and see. And I promise you, you will be amazed. So thank you guys so much for listening today.

We have a new Facebook group. It is called Clutterbug Organizing Advice. It's on Facebook and it's where we have 12,000 members and people are posting pictures of their space. They're asking for advice. They're sharing things that they're. they've organized in their home, so they're sharing motivation, and they're challenging each other, and it really is such a great group.

So I'm going to put the link to that group in the description. It's a private, closed group, so no one except the members in the group are going to see your space. You don't have to feel embarrassed or insecure that your friends and family are going to see your messiest dirty spots if you post about them on Facebook. It really is just for support, and everyone's really kind and caring. So I'm going to put the link to that group down below. And thank you guys so much again for listening for more organizing advice. You can check out my website and make sure you take that test on the website to see what your organizing style is.

And my website is www.w.combeg.m.m.e.combeg.combeg.combeg. And yeah, check it out. It's full of stuff. You'll see me. You'll see my face on there. So thanks again. We'll see you next time.