If your family has school-aged members, you’ve finally found time to get your house back in order now that the kids are back in school — or at least for the hours that they’re in school.
But if your family is anything like mine, you have a mix of kids in school and homeschooled, so it doesn’t matter what time of the year it is because there’s always a kid (or three) at home.
So how do I keep my house from looking like the morning after a college frat party? I make my kids clean up their crap, by any means necessary.
When they’re toddlers:
We start the process of teaching them to clean up as soon as they can walk. Of course, we make a game of it by cheering every time the baby puts a toy in the basket. As they get older and understand colors and their competitive nature starts to shine, we’ll make bets on who can get the most yellow balls in the bag or baby dolls into the closet. If your kid is past toddler-hood, don’t worry, there is still time to right the ship.
Prevent them from being overwhelmed.
We often help our four and six-year-old daughters clean to teach them through example what the minimum standard is. The first thing we do is help them pick up all the bigger objects and put them where they belong — large stuffed animals and toys, pillows and blankets, etc. Once they start seeing huge patches of visible carpet, it’s easier for them to keep moving along to start picking up the smaller toys.
Stow or it goes.
One of our most effective tactics across the board is that if our kids neglect their items, they never know where or when they’ll find them again.
Are those nasty socks under my table again? Enjoy walking through the wet lawn to get them. Left your earbuds out? I wouldn’t want your sisters to get them, so I put them up.
Baby dolls and their 50 million accessories abandoned across the living room? Your baby doll is going to foster care — quite literally, I’ll donate it.
This approach uses a lot of tough love, but it teaches them from an early age that no one will care about their things more than themselves and gives them the initiative to take care of them.
When all else fails, there’s bribery.
Now hear me out y’all…in my house, bribery works a little differently. For instance, our teenagers have been begging to have food and drinks in their room and our upstairs loft since we PCS’ed here. They want to drink soda and play video games at the same time and I want their room not to smell like sweaty socks. So, I made them a deal: If they could simply keep their room and the common areas they use clean by cleaning up after themselves, we would allow them to have food and drinks upstairs at their request. So far, we’ve graduated to allowing them to have cups of water with lids upstairs, and once they learn how to pick them up and bring them downstairs when they’re done, we might graduate to sodas or snacks.
We also reward for teamwork. If we see the kids cleaning up a mess that isn’t their own, especially without being asked to do so, we will treat them by allowing a special activity, such as extra driving or video game time for our teens or breaking out the swimming pool or tablet for the younger crowd.
The most important thing?
Consistency and common-sense boundaries. We don’t expect perfection and everything that we ask of them we’re already doing ourselves, thus setting the expectations through example. By doing so, we’re subconsciously teaching them that a part of growing up is learning how to clean up after yourself and others, as well as the fact that somehow, kindness is always rewarded through karma…and all this works because I never having to reset the WIFI password.
