There you are again, kneeling on the floor, gathering up dozens (or hundreds) of tiny pieces.
Lego, blocks, duplo, cars, doll accessories – it doesn’t really matter what kind, does it? Just that once again, you were the one left to clean it all up.
Let’s turn this around.
Let’s get the kids picking up their own messes. Let them deal with hundreds of lego bits, dozens of doll outfits, or that huge pile of wooden blocks.
How to make this nirvana reality? Three steps.
(Some) labeling
First, make sure your kids know which toys go in which bin.
As soon as they’re 4 or 5 years old, they’ll start learning your system. You can reinforce that blocks go in this red box, not in that smaller brown one, whenever they help you pick up.
For older kids, remind them once in a while if necessary. And check occasionally to make sure they’re not dumping all the toys in one bin to save themselves sorting work!
Bins and more bins
Second, you’re going to need bins or open boxes. Not lidded containers.
It’s way easier to pick up handfuls of toys and throw them in the proper container than it is to pick up one handful, remove a lid with your other hand, dump those toys, and replace the lid.
Takeaway: keep your toy containers unlidded.
The fewer barriers there are, the more likely they are to achieve a state of tidiness.
Small sets go faster.
Limits are gold
Third, pare down each collection.
This is the most important tip of the three. If your boys have 4 dozen little cars, it’s going to take them longer to clean up than if they only had their 1-2 dozen top favorites.
Same for any other toy set. Instead of the 200 piece play food suite, why not pick out 1 or 2 of each food type your kids like, keep all of their favorites (that would be chips and hot dogs over here), and completely skip the food varieties they don’t like (eggplant and garlic!).
You’ll wind up with a much more reasonable, shoebox-sized amount.
And smaller sets go much faster in the cleanup process.
(In fact, your kids may even start fighting over who gets to pick up the minimized sets! They’re not dumb – they don’t want to pick up 200 pieces when they could do 50.)
Play supervisor
Once you’ve reminded everyone which toys go where, gotten some bins (or removed lids), and cut your sets by half, you can get to the good stuff.
Making them clean up their own messes!
Start having them each choose a set to pick up. Then assign a second toy collection, if necessary depending on how much they’ve pulled out.
Your job: stand around and keep an eye on the process. Keep little ones on task, watch out for anyone indiscriminately throwing toys in a box, and provide encouragement.
After a couple weeks of this new system, the kids should start getting the hang of this. (The rule: We make a mess, we clean it up.)
You may even hear them enforcing the limits on each other. (Don’t dump those blocks in here; we don’t want a huge mess to pick up!)
And that’s when you’ll know it finally sank in.
Your kids know the rules now. And you don’t ever have to be the one kneeling on the floor, surrounded by hundreds of toys, again.
