Kids & Toys & Stuff: Three Tips for Managing It All

Kids and clutter seem to go together; it takes some real thought and effort to keep things under reasonable control. Here are some of the interesting suggestions I've been reading recently.

1. Gretchen Rubin shares her insights on when more isn't a good idea. Here's a small portion of the whole post.

I remember that when the Big Girl was in nursery school, the school head told a story about a four-year-old who had a toy car he loved. He played with it constantly. Then when his grandmother came to visit, she bought him ten toys cars, and he stopped playing with the cars altogether.

“Why don’t you play with your cars?” she asked. “You loved your blue car so much.”

“But I can’t love lots of cars,” he answered.

2. The Detroit News has a good article on conquering kid clutter. Here's just one of the suggestions.

Rotate the goods: Teachers say kids concentrate better on their play when they have just a few good toy choices rather than a dizzying range of options. Keep extra items in your garage or basement in boxes marked "toys on vacation," and swap them in every few weeks. Your house will be instantly neater.

[via Unclutterer]

3. Over at Parent Hacks there's advice on teaching kids to declutter their own toys. Here's how it begins:

I want Miss J (2 1/2) to learn how to "declutter" things herself, so before Christmas I told her that since she'd be getting new toys, we better make some room for them. I asked her if we could go through her toys and find some to give to "Baby Luciana" (a 1 year-old friend of ours).

[photo by mszippycat / Melanie Major]