Helping Kids Learn to be Organized
Some kids are naturally organized, but most aren’t. But they can learn to be organized! And it’s an important life skill that you can teach them. It will help them in school as well as in their future career, home, and family. Your child’s future roommates, partners, and kids will thank you.
It’s easiest if you can start them when they’re young, before they form bad habits and grow attached to their belongings.
But don’t worry if your kids are messy and unorganized! There’s still hope! Help them learn to be organized. It’s worth the investment in time and energy. Plus it will save you time and stress in the years to come if they can keep their things organized and help you tidy the house.
The tips in this post have worked in my home with my kids. I became a professional organizer when my kids were 6 and 4 and at that time our home wasn’t especially organized and had a lot of clutter. My son was quite sentimental and had a hard time letting go of things. My daughter was better at giving things away that she was no longer using, but she struggled with putting things away.
Over time, using the steps in this post, they became better at decluttering (often on their own now!) and staying organized. I choose my battles with them, with the goal of keeping the rest of our house organized, maintaining good relationships with them, while teaching them the value of decluttering and organizing. Are their rooms perfect? No! But they are better. And my kids have the skills to be able to do better when they leave home.
My son is in university now and I’m sure the townhouse he lives in with 7 other guys is not the cleanest place. But when setting up his room last year and this year, he understood the need to have a place for everything so he could maintain a good relationship with his roommate, maximize the space in a small room, and find things when he needed them.
My daughter’s room is messy at times, but when she needs to tidy it (mainly before friends come over), she can do it fairly quickly. She loves stuffed animals and has tons of them. I’ve tried over the years to encourage her let go of some of them but in the end, she was more wiling to let go of other things in order to keep her beloved stuffies. It was a trade off, and saved many arguments. She starts university in a few months and I’m confident she’s learned the decluttering and organizing skills she’ll need as she starts this new phase of life.
So there’s hope for your kids too! Here are the strategies I used with my kids and what I use with my clients too.
5 Tips to Help Your Kids Learn to be Organized
1. Model Organizing Skills for your Kids
It’s best if you can model organizing to your children. Set a good example of decluttering regularly to maintain an organized home. Keep the common areas of your home organized so your kids can see the value in being organized. It’s hard to expect your kids to be organized if you aren’t setting a good example yourself.
If your home is currently cluttered and unorganized, work away at the areas you have domain over before trying to tackle your kids’ rooms or the playroom. Ensure the kitchen, entry, living spaces, your bedroom, the bathrooms, etc. are organized and clutter-free. Make it easy for your kids to put things away in these rooms so these areas can stay organized. Then you can work with them on organizing their things.
2. Explain Why Organizing Is Important
Most kids thrive in a structured environment. Just like you probably get overwhelmed because of clutter and disorganization around you, they do too.
Help them see that knowing where to find things makes their lives easier. Demonstrate how much easier tidying their room is, when everything has a home.
Show them that choosing outfits to wear is simpler when they can see what they have and their drawers aren’t overflowing. Help them understand that they will be able to play with their toys more when they can see them, rather than having a lot of them get buried behind or underneath other toys.
3. Help Your Kids Learn To Let Go
One of my favourite expressions from Peter Walsh is this:
“When everything is special, nothing is special.”
To kids, everything can seem special. They want to hold onto everything. But then they don’t really enjoy their belongings. Whether it’s toys or games or artwork or projects or clothing or stuffed animals or gifts… it can’t all be appreciated and valued and played with and used when there’s too much of it. Help them learn to choose the most important things to keep and to let go of the things that are less valuable.
{Again… modeling this is really important! If you’re hanging onto lots of their baby, toddler, or childhood things, or if you don’t let go of your own things regularly, then they aren’t going to be motivated to give any of them away either.}
Some children don’t have any problems giving their toys away. But others do. When I started working with my kids on decluttering their things, I asked them to set aside things that were less special. They couldn’t do it. So I flipped it around and asked them to each pick 10 things that were their favourites. That was easier. Once they did that I asked them to choose 10 more things. We did this until the number of items was appropriate for the space they had. By the time we did a few rounds, they could see that what was left was less important to them than the items they’d already chosen and it was easier to give those things away.
If you’ve got a sentimental child, there are some great strategies in this post to help them let go of some of their belongings.
4. Establish Simple Guidelines
Don’t make things complicated. Kids like simple. And they’ll be far more likely to follow through on the skills you’re teaching them if they can remember a few simple “rules”.
Here are a few examples:
- Help them understand the one-in-one-out rule to set boundaries for their toys, books, and artwork (implement this after birthdays and holidays especially)
- Teach them to follow the saying “a place for everything and everything in its place” (you can use labels with pictures on them when they’re young to help them learn where things “live”)
5. Be Consistent
Habits are hard to break. If your kids are used to leaving their toys out after they finish playing, it will take time for them to develop the new habit of putting them away where they belong. If they bring their books or activities from one floor to another and then leave them where they used them, it will take time to learn to return them to the floor where they belong.
But new habits can be established! Teachers and daycare workers ensure kids put things back where they belong. They even build tidying time into the daily routines. Can you imagine what daycares and schools would look like if they didn’t? If kids can do it there, they can definitely learn to do it at home too!
Pick one new habit at a time and focus on that. Teach your children what you expect them to do. Give gentle reminders as they are learning this new habit (don’t nag or punish). You can use reward charts, or apps, or another behaviour modification system to help them become more independent. Once one habit has been established you can start developing another one. Keep enforcing the previous one so it remains ingrained. Over time, these new habits will become more natural and your children won’t need as many reminders.
Resources to Help Kids and Teens Learn to be Organized
There are some great kids’ and teens books available to speak to your children in a fun and lighthearted way. This is a great way to introduce the topic of decluttering or organizing without them feeling pressured or threatened.
Here are a few of my favourites (affiliate links):
- Where’s My Stuff? (for teens)
- It’s All Too Much, So Get it Together (good for Teens)
For more tips and strategies you can check out my Helping Kids/Teens Organize board on Pinterest!
So, if your children aren’t naturally organized, try these 5 tips and you’ll see a difference! It won’t happen over night, but over time, you’ll see your kids develop this important life skill!
How do you help your kids get organized?
If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else. Happy organizing!
I am a professional organizer, ready to help you declutter and organize the overwhelming areas in your home and develop systems that will work with your family’s lifestyle to help keep you organized!