Tidy kids
An acquaintance recently asked me if I work with children as clients, or if I have any advice for parents wanting to teach their kids how to tidy their rooms and organize their belongings. The answer is "Yes!" to both questions.
I have worked with older children (ages 12 and up), and they are my dream clients! They often don’t own too much, because they haven’t lived long enough to acquire as many belongings as an adult. They can also be very good at discerning between what they love and what they don’t, so they are innately good at checking for joy. For these reasons, we can usually tidy all categories in one session.
I find that organizing with pre-teens and teenagers is much like tidying with adult clients (in terms of their understanding of what is truly serving them), and therefore can be done virtually or in person with my guidance. Often, having someone besides a parent share ideas and listen to them is just what they need. When their adults step back and allow me to follow the teen’s lead, these young people are often quite enthusiastic about the process and enjoy the extra attention.
For tidying with younger children, I offer coaching and guidelines for parents. I feel that younger children are most comfortable with in-person guidance and supervision from their own adults, so I support families by teaching the adults a method to follow in tidying with their children. I tailor this method to suit each child and her/his specific space, lifestyle, and the available time.
Remember Mary Poppin’s song “A Spoonful of Sugar?”
In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun.
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game.
The biggest challenge of tidying with kids is getting them to do it on their own! My own children have never consistently kept their rooms in order on their own. They all enjoy the feeling that follows a good tidying, but they aren’t often inspired to initiate it themselves. If I comment about the untidiness of their rooms too much, they resent it. So instead of nagging, I make any major tidying job a special event that we share. That way, we both enjoy the process — and I learn so much about my child! It’s truly a worthwhile use of our time. And I know that if they were forced to live on their own right now, I have given them a method to fall back on, and they would know how to use it!
In the first line of the first chapter of Marie Kondo's book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, she writes, “You can’t tidy if you’ve never learned how.” This statement is so true. If we make the teaching of tidying special, we will all enjoy the pride created through working hard and making decisions about how we want to live.
Sometimes parents and children have trouble working together because of past conflict over the issue. Sometimes it is just a matter of finding the time and energy for such a task. In my experience with my own children, I find we need to do a deep room cleaning together once or twice a year. It is necessary, with growing children, to assist them in identifying what is working for them and what is not. Children’s clothing needs do change frequently, and it doesn’t take long for kids to collect more stuff than they know how to handle. Sending them off to their room to clean and organize alone, or punishing them until they complete it, just hasn’t ever made sense to me.
During my years teaching kindergarten and working in a Montessori school, I witnessed how quickly children pick up new routines when carefully shown proper procedure. It is natural for children to want to work, and once they know how, they can engage in it enthusiastically. They really are quite capable and independent if we go about guiding them and not controlling them. We must be careful not to project our own feelings about what we want them to do with their items. I have learned that it is a delicate balance between getting the results we as parents want and allowing the child to feel autonomy.
My own method, infused with KonMari principles, has proven to be successful and efficient in working with my children. There are three ways of approaching this, and I have tried each of them.
The first is the most extreme, and is my favorite — but it’s not doable for everyone. In this version, I want to grant you permission to take a day off from work and allow your child to stay home from school with you. This is a day devoted to getting to know your child and spending time looking more closely at their lifestyle, their interests, and their stuff. It is a special day to dive deep into their space by helping them remove and inventory all their belongings, clean their empty room, and finally move back in --- having sorted their stuff by category and eliminated what they don't love or need.
A second scenario would be to arrange for a weekend date when you can be completely alone with your child in their space, and follow the same procedure as I've described above.
The third, and often most practical, approach is to tackle one category in their room at a time. Start with clothing, followed next by books — then paper, komono (miscellany), and finally sentimental objects. Just find an hour here and there when the two of you (or three, if sharing a room) can tackle one category. Doing this together, even in small increments, allows some real bonding between parent and child. It is amazing what a little amount of your undivided attention can do for your child. I like to refer to this as catching two birds with one net. Tackling the tidying and having quality time with your child --- yes! Please view this as quality time. You are giving them the gift of your attention. My kids (okay maybe not my teenager) often look forward to their special day to be with Mom.
Just imagine: if we spend two days a year with our children from the time they turn 5 (essentially school age) until they are 18, helping them organize and tidy, they will have had 28 days of intentional tidying training. That is about a month of their life practicing real-life skills one-on-one with you. Cool!!! Now that's a gift for everyone involved!
This is a very sweet children's book written by Marie Kondo, and although it is tailored toward early childhood, my ten-year-old still enjoys reading it to my youngest — it is her favorite book! It simply explains a nice way to sort through your belongings by piles and essentially teaches the KonMari method of tidying on a kid’s level. For teens and young adults, I recommend Marie Kondo’s graphic novel The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: A Magical Story.
In Peace and Light,
Tidy On!