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How To Clutter Control Your Child's Bedroom
With a little clutter control, your frustration over your child’s messy bedroom will be a thing of the past. Just think of how great it will feel to no longer take one step forward and two steps back. With some clutter control and a personalized organizational system your child will have a solid foundation in which to build and maintain a clean and tidy room upon. Let’s begin with your child’s clothes. Sort through everything. Start with one big clothing pile or attack things drawer by drawer. Make sure your child is available to try stuff on and share their input re: favorite items. Making your child part of the clutter control process can lend itself to some great one-on-one-time not to mention it can also be a great learning opportunity for her. Start piles (or boxes) of out-of-season and outgrown clothing. Once compiled remove the unnecessary clothing from your child’s room. Or, at the very least store it on a higher shelf. The same goes for clothing your child hasn’t grown into yet. Box it up and store elsewhere. Simplify the clothing that remains. Does your child really wear all 25 T-shirts or does she just favor a few? One of the most genuine excuses children give for not hanging up their clothes is that they can’t reach the rods. Once you have purged the excess clothing, you need to make sure your child can access what’s left. Lower the closet rod and install shelves at child-accessible heights. Also consider investing in child-sized hangers and open plastic baskets or bins for socks and underwear. Old fashioned ‘catchall’ toy boxes may be the answer for your child’s stuffed toy collection but for small toys and books think shelves, shallow bins or carts with see-through wire baskets. You may even want to color-code shelves and bookcases. Come up with a color scheme that matches the room’s décor e.g. blue for books, green for games, and so on. The different colors will be a visual reminder of where things go. Label everything. You don’t need to get fancy with professionally made labels. Simply print some out on your computer and tape on. Now put the labels everywhere on the inside and outside of drawers, on shelf edges, on the outside of the plastic bins etc. It’s all well and good to organize your child’s room but unless you devise a maintenance plan all your work will be for not. Create a maintenance checklist and tailor the effort to your child’s age and ability. Build regular room maintenance into her daily routine. Sherrie Le Masurier is an organizing consultant and member of both the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) and Professional Organizers in Canada (POC). She is co-owner of www.decorating-kids-rooms.net a site dedicated to decorating and organizing children's rooms and www.familysanitysavers.com a site featuring smart solutions for busy parents. Copyright 2005.
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