It’s time to take off the kid gloves and tackle getting your children organized. Monday’s child may be fair of face, but frustrations mount when toys aren’t put back in place. Watch this video to tackle kid’s clothes, shoes, and toys. Without that daily stress you can be the poster child for relaxing, fun free time, and that’s not just child’s play!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdkids.)
Transcript:
Hi I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and online program. Today we’re talking about organizing for kids. I’m here in a closet that I just did a makeover on for some elementary age children When you’re working with kids, you have to think first about safety and age appropriateness and even their height.
Bring their frequently used items down to a level that is appropriate for them. You don’t want them climbing on something that might be unsafe. You also don’t want them to have to depend on you too much to do their morning and evening routines. Fostering independence means keeping things within reach, work with their habits. Kids like things to be put away as easily as possible, make it easy for them. Take your existing towel rack- you can pull that out and replace it with two hooks. Not only do you get two towels hung in the space of one, but you also have worked with a kid’s habit.
I’ve used ClosetMaid’s Shelf-Track Elite, which is fantastic for kids because not only can you use these laminate pieces and intersperse them with the wire shelving, but you also can adjust all of it. When kids get older, their needs change, they’re going to have different sizes of clothes, so you can adjust all of these pieces. Even these cubbies can adjust differently.
You can’t talk about kids without talking about toys. What you don’t want to do is store toys using a huge gaping toy box. It seems like a good idea because you can throw them all in one place, but it creates behaviors that you don’t want. One of them is rooting. The kids are rooting through the stuff because they can’t find anything, and then when they get frustrated it creates another behavior, which is dumping of the toy box. They’re just trying to get visibility to what they have. What you want to do instead is have categories with smaller containers and make it easy to find whatever you’re playing with. These fabric drawers are a great way to do this. You don’t want to store toys in the container that you purchased them in. Typically, that’s a flimsy box, and it’s great for getting the toy from the factory to the store, but not necessarily for storing. That’s why something like this fabric drawer is great, it holds all the little pieces, kids can throw that in really simply. And then, of course, you want to label that.
This a cute snap-on label that we found at Target. If you can’t find these, you can use a hanging string tag. You can get these at any office supply. But you definitely want to have some labels on these so the kids can find their stuff. The kids in this family are old enough to read really well. So these word labels were appropriate for them. If you have younger kids and they’re just learning to read, combining a word label with a picture is a better strategy. You can print out labels that are pictures of the actual toy, get that laminated, punch a hole in it, and hang it here. That will help their reading skills, and it helps their visibility to their toys.
Adjustability is a big deal when you’re creating organizing systems for kids. If the activity table is too youthful for your kids, move the cube storage idea into a nice piece of furniture like this six-cube storage unit from Target, which is a nice furniture style that will last all the way until they leave for college. What’s great about this is that these shelves are adjustable. You can put books in here, toys, and, of course, interchange those with the fabric cubes. You can also change the cubes themselves. These fabric drawers are available in all kinds of different colors and textures.
Learn more about these cube storage units at ClosetMaid.com, and if you like what you see, you can see more tips here on our YouTube channel. Share your ideas in the comments. You can find us at http://www.clutterdiet.tv.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to keep kids organized or getting kids to clean their rooms.
Leave a Reply