It seems like a child’s room can be a continual mess. Clothes and toys are everywhere. Even with bins to put toys in and hampers for clothes the mess still continues. How to deal with it?

My most common method use to be yelling, not at all effective! ~smile~ Then there were consequences for a messy room. Such as loss of privileges or missed events; that is if I could remember who lost what and who was suppose to miss what! Then I realized that perhaps there was just too much “stuff” in the room.

At the time I figured this out we were living in a small 3 bedroom house (1100 sq. ft) and had 7 children. Four of them being girls they shared one of the bedrooms. With two sets of bunk beds and one dresser I had to come up with a plan to keep life in that room from being chaos and out of control. I find my children, as well as myself, do not function well at all with chaos ruling. So how did I handle it?

First I dealt with the clothes. The 4 girls had one large dresser to share that had 5 drawers. So I assigned one drawer to each and the 5th for misc. I evaluated all there clothing. If we wash on a regular basis, which I was incorporating into my life :) they only need a certain number of clothes and a few extras for the unexpected. This number can vary depending on the age of the child; babies always seem to need more clothes than older children do. I pared down there clothing until it could all fit into one drawer and dresses and coats hung in the closet. Laundry was put in the basket (I had not got to the point of giving them their own baskets yet, some were to young) which was emptied to the main laundry daily.

Then it was time to deal with the toys. I boxed up all the toys except what was popular for the moment. The rest went to storage in the basement. In order to figure out how many toys were needed to play with at one time I made a rule, when I told them it was time to clean up they had 10 minutes to clean the room. Toys left on the floor after 10 minutes were taken by me! These toys were added to the ones in storage and we continued to pare down the toys to an amount that could easily and quickly be picked up in 10 minutes.

Now it seemed there was peace in the room. They could see the beds to make them each day (bigger children helping the younger ones who could not make their beds yet) and the floor was clean except for a toy box that held a few selected toys. When they were bored with these toys they were boxed up and exchanged for something else that had been stored.

This method worked very well for a long time. Now we have the 5 children that are left at home split between 4 bedrooms and I find that it still requires many of the same organization techniques that we had in years past. My children still share dressers and closets and need to work regularly at keeping the mess and the clutter in their rooms down to a minimum.

As in so many areas of a home, clutter and too much “stuff” can be the biggest obstacle to being able to keep a room and a home orderly.