Find yourself dreaming that Marie Kondo is just knock on your door some day, and come in to help sort out all your mess?
Yep, me too.
However, I realise that is probably not going to happen anytime soon, and that my best bet, is to just tackle it myself.
Now that my children are past the toddler stage and that little bit older, I am forever trying to teach them not only that they have to do their chores and help out around the house, but also the importance of tidying – and how keeping their rooms and things in order will make everything so much easier.
In fact, studies have even show that living with mess and clutter can have a very negative impact on our mental wellbeing, causing stress and even anxiety. And I bet you have felt this yourself, how, when the house is in a state of chaos, the rest of your life feels slightly off too, like you can't focus your mind on other tasks and you can't really even sleep well, knowing your home is a mess.
So what this means, of course, is that teaching children how to keep their belongings tidy is important. Not just because you want to show them how to be responsible and tidy up after themselves, but also to instill in them the importance of keeping their surroundings tidy, knowing this will actualy benefit their health, both now and later in life.
But just how to get kids to feel passionate about – or even remotely interested in – tidying up?
It seems Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin of
The Home Edit might just have the answer.
The tidiness experts recently chatted to
PureWow about how to teach your notoriously messy kids how to keep their space and their bits tidy.
The Home Edit founders explained that organizing by color (as seen above) is your best bet for a child’s space.
“If a child is going to be using something,
organizing by color is way more predictive for them and more intuitive and easy to use,” they explained. “You wouldn’t want to organize something by the alphabet for a child that is just learning how to read. Organizing by color makes a lot more sense.”
Rainbow-coded organising? We like the sounds of that.
But how does it actually work, you ask?
Shearer and Teplin explains: “The rainbow is actually like a label in and of itself. It’s not a vocabulary word, but organizing by the rainbow is literally like a set of instructions and it acts as a label…It’s telling you where to put it back. You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s orange. It goes between red and yellow.’”
As for other child-friendly organising tips? The two mums behind Home Edit suggests one tool to keep the chaos contained.
“A general-purpose toy basket,” they said. “Something that can hold big bulky things. You can do several of them depending on what your kids play with. [But get] something that can hold big categories, like train track parts or building blocks, LEGOs, dolls. The smaller bins can be very useful, but the big multipurpose bins solve a huge issue.”
Sounds good, mums? We are devoting this week to getting the chaos under control, how about you?
