How to Parent with Positive Discipline

Home Blog Have a question for the blog? Contact Articles: The Secret to 2-5 yo - Talk Less, Do More! Being On The Same Team Authority or "Help! The Kids are Winning!" Toddlers and Discipline How To Guide for Tantrums 3-5yo Taming The Mess

Taming The Mess It is common for parents to expect that saying, "Clean up!" somehow magically instills the skills to do so - even though many of us parents lack these same skills and are regularly overwhelmed by our own messy homes!   If you think about it, cleaning up is a very complex set of skills - pattern recognition, organizing, pacing, creating an efficient system and making all these things a habit so that they are not stressful.  It takes time to master these skills and learn the self discipline to keep going.  Younger children don't have either these skills or this self discipline so you'll have to help for quite a while.  That's okay - if you have children who, in the long run, have cleaning-up-skills and self discipline, that's a huge huge victory! When teaching Clean-up skills to younger children, there are two rules:  make it EASY and make it FUN. Make it Easy To make it easy, you have some preparation work to do.  First things first - you need to de-clutter.  You know what I mean - all those extra toys no one loves, all those broken plastic bits at the bottom of the toy box....  They all must go!  Make a Goodwill pile for all the toys that your child has outgrown or that simply aren't to his taste.  Enlisting his help in this might not be easy.  One way to manage it is to explain that with more useless toys gone, Christmas & birthdays have more room for good ones.  You can create an in/out policy for a while - every new toy has to make an old toy leave until you are down to "just great toys."   Talking about how Goodwill gives toys to children who don't have any can be motivating, too.  I have to admit, I have had no luck with these approaches till over 7 years old, so I'm devious.  I just do a major weeding of toys about twice a year.  I bag them up & hold onto them for about 3 months - if no one notices a specific toy is gone, off to Goodwill they go!  One thing you might note here is that most of the un-loved toys are non-open ended toys.  Toys that are open ended are toys like Legos, wooden blocks, K'nex, magnets, dolls, doll houses, puppets and costumes.  These toys all share the same trait - they can be used to imagine just about anything.  Non-open ended toys are toys that really only have one purpose or only inspire the imagination of one story.  As you get future toys for your kids, make the focus be on open ended toys.  They last longer, can be used over a much greater age span, inspire tons of imagination, limit your clutter and are often sets that can be added to as your child grows. Once you have de-cluttered the useless toys, put away about one third of the toys in the garage so that you can rotate them in & put away a different third when the first third gets "boring."  Now this is the more intensive part where you can really involve your child.   The remaining toys need to have have a box or container or shelf designated for every single type of toy.  Have your child help you pick out boxes he likes, decorate the boxes or shelves and put a visual references on each box or shelf to show which toys go in there  Put on Lego pictures for the Legos, car pictures for the cars and so on.  Kids can really get into putting on stickers or drawing pictures to tape on or writing labels.

For toys with a bazillion small pieces, consider making a parachute-type container for each type of toy.  To make the parachute container, cut out a big circle of fabric.  Cut it large enough that when it is spread out your child can sit and play with the toys within the area of the fabric.  Then punch holes around the outside edge & thread a ribbon through the holes & tie the ends.  Then put the bazillion pieces in the middle of the circle   When it's time to clean up just pull the ribbon - now the circle of fabric is a bag!  You can also use a version of this with a simple blanket or small rug.  Have the blanket/rug on the floor with the rule that all toys-with-a-bazillion-bits (Legos, Bionicles, K'nex etc.) have to be played with on the blanket/rug.  Then when the child is done, he can just scoop all the toys to the middle.  The blanket/rug system works well for children who are inclined to be tidy, but the parachute bag is a more concrete concept for younger or messier children.  There!  Those steps make cleaning up easy.  Make It Fun Now make it fun!  Fun fun fun!  When you're 2, 3, 4 or 5 soooo much can be accomplished when it's FUN!  Don't for a second make it look like cleaning up is drudgery or a chore.  Just make it fun and matter-of-fact.  Tell your child "This is how we do things now that you're 2, 3, 4 or 5."  After a group of toys has been played with, or every hour, or 3 times a day - what ever works for you - jump in there with him, put on the FUN CLEANING MUSIC (kids music or fun dancy music - something with energy) and explain that you guys need to clean up really quick so that he has more room to play (more room for FUN!).  Then *help your child* pick up everything and put it in it's place.  Remember, you are *teaching* cleaning-up-toy-skills, not expecting them to magically appear.  To teach, you have to be there, doing with your child.  Have a race - who can pick up faster?  Have him identify all the Legos, all the blocks, all the cars etc and put them away in their containers.  Have a clean up race against a kitchen timer set to 1 minute for each kind of toy.   Have a clean up race against the end of the song.  Have a clean up race against mom or siblings - as long as it can be a fun, non-stressful event.  Clean up as if you are a lion.  Clean up as if you are a bulldozer.  Let the children pretend to be the mom and direct the cleaning up.  Dangle your toddler upside down & let him pick up one toy at a time.  Be the monster who eats children if they can't get all the dolls in their box before you crawl over there.   Remember to keep clean-up part of your routine - jump in and help him at regular intervals that are consistent every day.  If you can make it more frequent at first, it will prevent the problem of 10 different kinds of toys being already on the floor and it will help him build the skill more quickly.  It will also help him get used to the idea that this how it will happen from now on. Teaching clean up is a long process that starts small and builds slowly.  It is a life skill and one that saves so much stress and loss of self esteem later!  How many of us learned to clean effectively as children?  Not very many.  If you can commit yourself to teaching this skill over the long term, you are helping your child learn many skills, keeping self esteem high and on top of it you have a tidier house!  You can't lose :)