MYTH: Keeping your house organized with kids is impossible. FALSE! Read my 4 hacks for handling the clutter

Let's face it, kids are messy. BUT the clutter doesn't have to take over your home. Keep reading to see how I stay on top of it with just a few minutes a day!

Stuff gets everywhere throughout the day. You can help this by setting up time every few hours to do a quick pick up of toys that are not being currently played with. You can engage kids in this by singing a song as you do it. Make this time into a fun game. Kids follow our lead, and if we show our distaste in picking things up both with toys and our own messes, kids notice. Kids will imitate our emotions and by making clean up checks fun, they will imitate this also. Seriously, make it FUN! (yes, REALLY)

Here are 4 hacks to creating a system to start controlling the clutter:

1. Build good habits by creating consistency which helps kids to anticipate when it will be daily. This means maybe a mid morning clean up right before snack time, before/after lunch before nap (if they are at a nap age) and then a before dinner clean up and before bedtime. By spreading this out, it's also at a time when they already are moving to something different and it becomes a natural thing to put together.
2. Contain the clutter by having labeled bins for toys. Labels help kids learn where things go and encourage them to participate in the clutter clean up. This doesn't mean it has to be micro managed and sorted, but even having cube sized bins for a broad catagory will train their brains to know where things go. For example, if you have a bin labeled legos, you don't have to separate by color or style, they can just put them all in there and make it an EASY clean up.
3. Learn your child's natural organizing style and find ways that work with that instead of against it. This means that if your child naturally puts stuffed animals in a pile by the bed, create a home for the animals by the bed not in another corner of the room . Again, if it's lego instructions that tend to be thrown on the floor next to a table...put a crate next to the table where the legos are already going, not try to make the child put all the instruction manuals on a shelf in closet.
4. Have some toys accessible for kids to pull out by themselves, and some toys that only come out when you intentionally get them out for an activity. The idea behind this is that by limiting the amount of toys that have the option of being out on the floor, the clutter clean up times will be fast and easy.

Taking daily steps towards this goal will allow you to create a long term habit. You will learn skills that will not only help with toy clean up but in other areas of life also.

Want to learn more tips on creating an organized and happy home? Join my moms group (HERE)