Life Kit - Drowning in toys? Here’s how to handle kid clutter

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Having kids comes with a lot of clutter - some of it even shows up before your baby does. From toys that overflow from the toy chest, to unwanted hand-me-downs, and piles of art your kids make, you can't keep it all.   Psychotherapist Denaye Barahona offers advice for parents on the whys and hows of decluttering.  Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekitTo manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Mariel. I think many of us have had this experience where we attempted to declutter, to Marie condo our homes, and we hit an emotional roadblock. There in our hands was some item that we had no use for anymore, and yet we were emotionally attached, not ready to throw it away or even donate it. This seems infinitely more likely when the object in question reminds you of your kid and the time when they were so little.

I often think about, like, you know, my kids have, like, nice winter jackets from when they were younger, and they're very sweet, and I remember them all, like, puffed up in these beautiful little jackets. And I think to myself, like, oh, I have such a hard time letting this go. Dene Barahona is a psychotherapist who works with children and families in New York City. And the way she gets out of this trap is she reframes the situation. But then I think, should this jacket? spend the next 30 years in this box, or should it be on the body of another child somewhere that needs it? And I think that just sort of picturing that jacket, living its life on somewhere else, really helps me to let it go. Her tip here, and the approach that's worked for her family,

is to create not a donate pile, but a share the love pile. Okay, yeah, it's a bit of semantics, but... For whatever reason, when I call it the share the love pile, I'm much more inclined to put things into it. As a parent, it is worth doing this, decluttering, because others will benefit from your donations, because you, the adults in the house, will now have more room to function, and because simplicity can help children thrive. When you have kids, your life will likely get more complicated, more chaotic, more cluttered. So many different things are thrown at us, whether it's physical things, material things, mental clutter, we're busy, our brains are busy, our houses are busy. So it's a work in progress. It is a practice. On this episode of Life Kit, how to handle

kid clutter from birth through early childhood. Life Kit reporter Andy Tagle talks to Dene about how you might need less stuff than you think when you're having a baby, how to get kids of every age involved in decluttering, and how to say goodbye to those precious pieces of macaroni art. When you're helping clients with this, is there a most common problem? Is it, you know, is it the emotional part? Is it letting go? Is it, you know, strictly organization? What do you see most often? You know, I think that over the years, since Marie Kondo has entered into our wonderful world, I think that people are starting to really embrace the idea of letting go of things. I think it gets trickier when we miss the memo that in order to really live a lighter life that we actually

have to stop accumulating so many things. So I see a lot of people decluttering pretty well and then recluttering even better. So that is a process, I think, that we have to figure out how to work our way out of. Takeaway one, less is more. Generally speaking, the less stuff you have to organize and keep track of, the more manageable, functional, dare I say, enjoyable, the spaces you keep are likely to be. And this rule definitely applies to kid stuff too. Denae says if you're a parent or on your way to becoming one, it's natural to want to give them the world.

But when it comes to what kids actually need to thrive. Having less lets them do more, it lets them create more, it lets them innovate more. That said, she's also a parent who understands the anxieties that come with wanting to set up that absolutely perfect nursery. Maybe you're tempted to buy every brand of diaper. Set up baby monitors in every room. Sign up for a couple of those toy subscriptions.

I think that is something that happens, especially with new expectant parents who are really excited, is they really need to have all the right things because if you have the right sleep sack, that baby will sleep better, right? Because your neighbor told you that their baby only slept in that sleep sack. So thinking that if we could buy the right things, that we would be more successful in this journey to becoming new parents. Like buy the $2,000 bassinet, whatever it is, right? And there are no, there are no magic tricks when it comes to things that we can buy. to make babies feel more comforted.

Now, there are tools that can be useful for sure, but I think that sometimes when we're emotionally overloaded, we can feel like there's a quick solution on Amazon to it. And sometimes there is, but that's rare. That brings us to takeaway too, and this applies for consumers of every age. Take a pause before you buy something new. And ask yourself, is this truly necessary?

Does this thing serve a new purpose, in my life? Or is this just another round of stress-induced impulse buys? The most important thing is limiting the acquisition of stuff. So always wondering, why am I buying this? Why do I need this? Do I already have something like this that is serving this purpose? Am I replacing something or am I adding something? If you're in your nesting phase specifically, you're going to want to get those absolute nursery necessities. And then instead of automatically buying a bunch of new baby gadgets and gizmos in the name of capital P preparedness, consider spending that pre-baby time decluttering and making your space functional for baby's

arrival instead. It's lots of fun to fold and hang all those itty-bitty clothes in the closet, but a lot of other spaces will need adjustment once you bring tiny home. I never considered the fridge in the freezer, for example. If you're planning on breastfeeding, you're going to need lots of freezer space. But really, any parent-to-be would be well-served to clear out the fridge for the many, many casseroles, takeout meals, et cetera, in your future. And on a similar note, decluttering your kitchen and bathroom storage to make way for the inevitable onslaught of baby products is a very smart move. But be careful, because recluttering can sometimes disguise itself as organization.

I thought for a long time that it was just that I didn't have the right bins and I needed to go to the container store and buy the bins. And if I had the right bins, then I would be organized and everything would be fine. And long story short, is that I realized that no organizational system was ever going to solve this problem. It was that I simply needed to have fewer things because I, in my brain, am not capable of managing all these things. I also, when I get really motivated to organize, go to target and buy more bins. So if you wear that person like me who goes and buys more bins, instead of looking at your stuff, how can you go and look at your stuff and figure out what is a necessity and what is the extra stuff? Yeah. Something that really helps me is I like to sort of

classify my spaces as active spaces and storage spaces. So for example, the top drawer in my bathroom is an active space. I go in there every day. That's where my makeup is. That's where my hair dryer is. Now, that active space should only hold things that I'm actively using every single day. Right. And I learned this lesson the hard way in the sense that I had this before I decluttered, I had a drawer for jeans. And in the gene drawer, I had like 30 pairs of jeans. And I only wore one pair of jeans. But for years, I would rifle through the gene drawer looking for the pair of jeans. Right. So my gene drawer was a combination of active and storage. And what I really needed was to get all of that stuff I didn't wear out of there and put it into storage, or better yet, share the love, so that I could

easily get to see and find the things that I need, the things that I use. Takeway three, love this idea. Instead of simply lumping all your like items together, distinguish between your active and storage spaces. And then distribute your stuff accordingly. Man, would this have been helpful to know when I was a brand new parent? I'm thinking about this box I had that was just all the nursing things. It had instruction manuals, stuff I tried and didn't like, stuff I used exactly once at the hospital and never looked at again, as well as very necessary cords and milk storage bags I needed constantly.

So essentially, three times a day, I was rifling through what was mostly a box of junk. Another place to apply this is communal spaces, like your entryway closet, for example. Do you really need to have your winter boots out in June taking up a bunch of space? Or those dress shoes you wear twice a year? Do they need to be out at all? Come to think of it, when was the last time you wore those? Then the little cousin of yours really love them? Okay, what about controlling incoming items?

A lot of new parents will get hand-me-downs that will be very well-intentioned, but maybe you feel like you can't say no or you don't know whether or not it's something that you might need. What can we do? Hand-me-downs are a bit of a different beast. right, because they're free, but they also come with like a little bit of baggage because the people that give them to you often are giving them with love and they cherish those things. And they're kind of looking forward to your kids wearing those things and seeing some of those things on your kids. I had someone in my family that gave a huge influx of hammy downs and 90% of

it just wasn't going to work. Like logistically, things don't always work. And sometimes it just it doesn't work for you and that's okay. So what I had done in those situations was I will pick a couple of key things out and I will say, I went through the things, thank you so much for thinking of me. I picked out a couple of things that are really going to work and I passed the rest along to a friend or I passed the rest along to the goodwill, whatever it is. And I am a person who cannot lie and I just, I'm like for me and not everyone's like this, I would, every time I see that person, I would be thinking to myself, oh my gosh, I bet they're wondering where their hand-me-downs went. Totally.

Whether or not they ever really think about them again in my head, that's where I would be. It would be in my conscience, yeah. Right. So I feel like clearing the air would help me to feel like I acknowledged that I took in the things. I chose a couple of things that I found value in. And then I passed along and I shared the love of the rest of the things with someone else.

Yeah. Along a similar line, I'm thinking about big ticket items, you know, something I've been struggling with personally is what to do with like the bass. net and the crib and the rocking chair. You know, we're out of that phase. We're hoping we'll use it again in the future, but we're not sure exactly when that's going to be. And we have very limited space, you know? So right now, it is just clutter, but we would love to not have to buy those things again. What do you do? You know, I think the reality is that if you go on to have a second or a third or a fourth, you start to realize how little you need and how that rocking chair,

although it was really essential for your first when you had these like really peaceful evenings, now you might be like feeding that baby walking around your house, following your toddler around. Right. So you're probably not going to be sitting in peace as often for as long of periods of time in that rocking chair as maybe you did with your first. So I think we learn to live with less out of necessity after the first baby because usually we go big and we get excited. We buy a lot. People buy a lot for us. Very blessed. But then, And we realize, oh, yeah, did I really need all of that? I'm sensing a theme here.

I'm sensing that perhaps less can be more. Absolutely. How does this apply for the things we buy our own kids? I think when it comes to buying for kids, our motivation is so different. You know, we like to think we're buying gifts or toys for kids because it brings them joy. But I think if we look really closely, we're actually buying things for kids because it brings us joy to see them having joy. to see them having joy. And we are often buying things for them

because we can't wait to see the look on their face when they open up the gift. And that is something that I let go of a really long time ago. How? How did you do that? So we do that with experiences, right? So I get so excited to surprise my kids with experiences. But we do not do that with stuff.

We don't do, sadly, and my children will probably grow up and talk about this with their therapists. We've never done gifts at birthday parties before. So, and my rationale for that has always been, like, if you have a birthday party, you should be focusing on the joy of celebrating with the people that are there with you at the party. And not the incoming onslaught of all the gifts and that everyone's carrying in. And it's really, really hard to do that. I mean, if you are a child of any age and you see all of these wrapped gifts coming in,

like all this huge influx of dopamine coming into your party. Like how do you focus on the people? It's just something that's going to make my day by seeing them smile. I think I can get a little more creative other than buying them more toys. Coming up after the break, we'll talk about what to do if you're already dealing with toy overwhelm. I'm totally just asking for a friend. Can you talk a little bit about teaching kids to scale back? Yeah, we often give kids more than they can handle.

And I found this out, hard way and when my kids became interested in Pokemon cards. And the accumulation of Pokemon cards is no joke because they're cheap. You get a pack of 10. And 10 Pokemon cards is not bad to clean up, but a thousand is pretty bad to clean up. And so what was happening was the Pokemon cards were everywhere. They were all over because they would look at them. They would try to sort them. They would put them in the binders. They'd take them out of the binders. And they weren't getting taken care of. Like they were getting bent. They were getting broken. They were being left in piles. I was tripping over them. And I realized that my kids just couldn't handle that many Pokemon cards. So we took

the Pokemon cards and we created sort of like an active storage type system for them. And we picked a few for them to actively use and look at and organize. And then the rest we put into storage. And I said, you know, let's learn how to organize these and we'll take care of these. And then as you get better at that and as you get older, I'll give you some more. And then you can slowly increase the quantity that you have if you show me that you can manage it. And it's not punitive. It's more of the consequence, unfortunately, of this is if I give you more than you can handle, I'm going to be mad and I'm going to be annoyed about the mess. And it's going to impact our relationship because I'm going to be following you around whining about the mess and complaining that you're not cleaning it up.

So in order to really support our relationship, like, I'm going to give you what you can handle and what I can handle. And we'll go from there. And I think if we can help our kids to understand that that is our goal. Our goal is not control. Our goal is not punitive, but it is to have more peace and to have more calm in our house. I think more can get on board with that. Takeaway four. If it's a struggle to get your little one to clean up after themselves, have you considered that they might just have too much to clean? It's fair enough, right? You ever gone to tidy your own closet full of clothes or your drawer full of makeup? That great unruly bookshelf? And just been so overwhelmed by all your stuff, you just didn't even know where to

start. So set your kids up for success. If you're following the theme of this episode, you can probably start by lightening your load. Assess how many toys you really need around the house. Toy rotation is another popular option these days. That's when you only put out a certain number of toys in your active spaces for a certain amount of time, and then you store the rest. In addition to reducing your kids overwhelm, pairing down the toys can also help with the look of your family spaces. Let's talk a little bit about utility versus aesthetics. I'm thinking about the gigantic playpen that my son loved, that saved my life for a long time, but it was so, it was so ugly. It was so ugly. It took up all the free walking space in the living room. What do we do

about these often very functional and very ugly things? I mean, I think we can remind ourselves that it's fairly recent that parenting became so aesthetically pleasing. These large pieces of plastic have existed for quite some time. It's a phase, and that pack and play is not going to live in your living room forever, but if it's serving a purpose and it is giving you life in many ways, then maybe you can look past the colors of it or the shape of it or just the presence of it all together. But, you know, for some of us, we can't. And for some of us, it just stresses us so much that every time we look at it, that it is taking more than it's giving. And I guess that would be the question to ask, is it giving more than it's taking or is it taking more than it's

giving? That's a really good barometer. When it comes to storage organization in kids' rooms, kids' play spaces, do we need a lot of investment? Do you need perfect, beautiful shelves in order to get kids to organize? So I do think organizationally there are some things that we can do to make it easier for kids to clean up, but also make it easier to find the things that they're looking for. So I definitely prefer clear bins, preferably shorter bins. It makes it a lot easier for kids to clean up. And a lot of the dumping behavior, the messmaking behavior can come from looking for the thing that they want or just kind of not really knowing where to begin and just kind of tearing through things. That's a great segue because my next question was going to be getting kids involved.

You know, if you don't have a kid who naturally wants to clean up or who is resistant or it hasn't already been part of your family process, how do you start that? It's always best to give them some autonomy and some power over choosing how they're going to contribute. So I might say like you, how, or like, let's pick, we need to clean up the blocks, the magtiles, and the cars. Which one do you want to start with? And I'll start with the other, right? Divide and conquer. I think when we give them some choice, it helps to increase the buy-in. I think the biggest miss I see on getting kids to clean up their toys is that we expect too much, right?

We have a kid, like, go clean up your toys. And it's a disaster. There's so many, they don't even know where to start. So we're asking them to execute on a pretty complex. task. I think that is a problem that we run into a lot. And the other is that sometimes we will threaten punishments. If you don't clean up your toys, you will not be able to go to the park. Or if you don't clean up your toys, you're not going to get dessert, whatever it is. If we look at behavior psychology research, we know that if we want to increase a behavior, we need to use motivation.

If we want to decrease the behavior, we use punishment. I might say, all right, we're so excited. like we're going to go outside and play, but first we're going to clean up our toys and then we're going to go outside and play. Right. So what I've done right there is I've used something we're already going to do, something they look forward to, and I'm putting that after the undesired task of cleaning up the toys. And we get so much better cooperation from our kids as a result. Last step, takeaway five. To get kids involved in the cleanup process, first, make sure you've set your own expectations accordingly. For smaller kids especially, break down tasks into bite-sized pieces to make them more manageable. And consider pairing cleanup with something fun to help motivate

them. Another top tip, do what you can to make the cleaning itself fun. Make a silly cleanup song. Make it a game with a little prize at the end. Have the whole family pretend to be cleaning robots. With that one, you don't just have a tidy living room. You have a memory. We covered a lot of things that kids need and care about. But the other side of this, I think, is all this stuff that kids bring home, you know, that fingerprint art and that first ever handmade mothers or fathers day card and pipe cleaners and puff paint, everything. It feels just absolutely positively wrong to throw any of that stuff away. Yeah. So I have one box. It's probably maybe 18 inches by 24 inches, by six inches deep. And it is my art box of my kids' artwork. It's actually a really beautiful

box. I don't know where I got it, but I love looking at it. I love opening it. Like it just makes me feel happy. And so over the years, what I've done is I have filled that box. And when it gets so full that it doesn't close anymore, I go through and I look at the things again, because that's really why we save them, right, so that we can pull them out and look at them again. And I, some of always, something, a lot of somethings in the box, I'm like, what is this? Who made this? Why did I save this? And I can kind of go through and call through and take some of the things out that felt really important at that time. But if they've already six months a year later started to lose their value when I forgot why I saved them, then I certainly am not going to remember why I saved them 30 years

from now. So I think that going through making sure that those things still hold value just a short time later has helped me to kind of keep myself within the parameters of that box of the special things. Deney, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you. Okay, kids, let's have a tidy recap. Takeaway one. Less is more. The less stuff you have to organize and keep track of, the more manageable your spaces will be.

Nurseries and playrooms especially. Takeaway two, don't reclutter right after you declutter. Before you buy, before you accept any hand-me-downs, ask yourself, am I replacing something or am I adding something? Takeaway three, separate your active and storage spaces and distribute your stuff accordingly. Takeaway four. Set your kids up for success by only giving them as many toys as they can handle.

That might mean working with them to pair down how many they have right now. And finally, takeaway five. Have realistic expectations when it comes to kids, cleaning, and decluttering. Break down tasks into bite-sized pieces to make them more manageable and consider pairing cleanup with something fun to motivate your little ones to get moving. Here comes cleaning, robot. That was Life Kit reporter Andy Tagle talking to Denei Barahona. Before we go, what do you think?

Would you be willing to rate and review Life Kit in your podcast app? You could tell us a favorite tip you've learned or what kinds of episodes you like the most. We love hearing from you. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Malika Garib and our visuals editor is C.J. Rikulon. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and Mika Ellison. Engineering support comes from Damian Herring.

I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.