Time to Put the Toys Away..

Clean up doesn’t need to be mom’s job. SuperMom is not your job description. Training children from the start is a great way to make life easier on mom, not to mention teach kids self-reliance. Clean Up is not just a part of play, it’s a part of life. It’s a skill they will carry with them throughout their life. The earlier they learn it, the more a blessing the habit will be.

As children grow, you start to realize that mom can’t do everything for everybody. Kids are a lot more capable of doing things for themselves. When they learn to walk, and fall, they learn to pick themselves back up. Mom doesn’t pick them up every time. Likewise, if they can get their toys out, they can put them away.

Believe it or not, children as young as 18 months can put their toys away. Clean-up is a part of play. If they learn early, it’s a habit they will always have, and Mom won’t have to do it every night. It doesn’t have to be boring, though. The easier and more fun it is, the more likely they will follow suit. Children thrive on routine, so consistency is key, and they will soon be doing it with little complaint. Eventually, it simply becomes habit. This is a skill that they’ll carry with them through life.

When ours were under 5 we had a simple toy box behind the couch, out of the way. When it was time to go somewhere, time for dinner, or time for bed, it was clean up time. We gave a 10 minute warning with subsequent countdown, so their play time wasn’t suddenly interrupted. This helped prevent toddler tantrums. Every few minutes, we’d give them a reminder with how many minutes they had left. When time is up, you tell them it’s clean up time.

It also proved helpful to have a song to use and even a game or two, to switch it up. We had a very simple song they loved to sing when they were tiny and they loved tossing the toys into the tote. I lead by example by starting to put forgotten or hard to reach toys into the box, as they finish up their playing. When they see me cleaning up, they know I mean business. I was always “slower” so they put the vast majority of the toys away. Times when they were resistant, I would challenge them to see who could go faster or who could put the most away. As they got older, I helped less and less, but still had the count down warning. Again, they learn self-reliance, and mom has more time to get things done.

Self-reliant kids and more available time for mom means mom gets more things done in the day, and has more free time to spend with the kids. Clean-up becomes a win-win in this case.

Several old and new kids shows have some sort of clean up song. When I first started “clean up time” I sang, “Time to put the toys away, do dah, do dah” over and over again. After one of their favorite characters had a show on cleaning up garbage, they started singing that song to put the toys away. A simple YouTube search lists several choices to choose from, as well.

As kids get older and into more involved toys, and toy sets that are kept in their own containers, clean up isn’t as simple. Prevention becomes the name of the game. Instead of having every container opened with toys everywhere, simple rules can be put into place. They can be required to put a box away before getting out another, or they can have a limit of two or three out at a time, with the rule then being put one away in order to get another out, once the limit is reached. Kids like to mix sets for creative play, like building Lego cities for their cars, block castles for their action figures, and other possibilities. Too many sets at once can be overwhelming and distracting, and make clean-up seem impossible.

When you seem to have an overabundance of toys and many get forgotten, or simply no room to store them all, rotating toys is an excellent way to handle this. As a family with five kids, with generous grandparents, and several aunt and uncles, our home seemed to overflow with toys. We solved this issue by packing several sets away in the attic. They would gladly play with the sets they had for a month or two, then ask to exchange them. This way, there is no need to find extra storage in the living area. This also makes the toys that come down seem new again.

In order to do this, some families take pictures and create a “catalog” of their toys, or write out a list of the sets, then the children pick out which ones they want to bring down, and the parent does the exchange of boxes. I would take the older children up, allow them to put the old boxes away, and decide together which sets they wanted to bring down. This was an exercise in teamwork for them.

This may sound unbelievable to some of you, but after more than 20 years with five children, I can tell you it’s not only possible with a few kids, but necessary in big families. Want to know more, keep reading this blog.