It is not uncommon in today’s culture that children are not taught to clean up after themselves. Many parents are busy, they don’t have time to stop and make a child comply. When the parent asks for help cleaning and the child chooses to ignore them. It can be infuriating. I get it. I work with kids, and I often need to remind myself to stop and make my children clean up after themselves. I too work for fifty hours a week and when my childcare children leave, I don’t want to have to make my children comply. I did that all day. But I have also learned that long term if they are held accountable when younger, they are much better at taking care of themselves when they get older. This is when it becomes a blessing to parents. Older children are now able to help clean up the house, which long term reduces Mom and Dad’s workload. This also is a skill they will use in school and later in life. It is a basic life skill.
So, when the house looks like a bomb went off with toys everywhere, it is time to create systems and rules to help your little ones learn to clean up. This starts with us as parents. The children can’t do it on their own. Today most families have an abundance of toys. Start with cleaning out the ones they no longer play with or are broken. Then create a place for every toy. If there is not enough room within the environment, or there are just too many toys, consider a toy rotation. Put the other toys in totes at the top of the closet or in the attic and make a plan to rotate them. In my home with a childcare program, we rotate the toys by season and theme. Every family needs to figure out what works for them.
One of the most difficult things to figure out when planning a play space for our littles is how many objects go into a basket at one time. For instance, should the car basket have 25 cars or 10 cars? This again depends on the ages of the children. With my littles in childcare, ten small cars are plenty, but when my grandchildren who are four and six years old come over, we end up getting more cars out. We have the same issue with the magnet tiles. The older children want to create more elaborate creations which need more tiles. It may require a little time and adjustments to figure out what works in your environment.
Next, decide on several times of the day when everyone will stop and pick up. In our house, we pick up before we go outside {midmorning}, before lunch, before nap, before dinner, and at the end of the day. Include rules for projects that are in process, possibly a safe shelf, this becomes more important with kids five and older. Labeling shelves, and baskets or boxes with pictures is helpful for little ones to be able to figure out where things belong.
Don’t expect young children to be able to clean up independently the first time. It is a learning process. Making it a game by beating a song, is a fun way to motivate the children. Ask each child to pick up one type of toy, such as “Jonny pick up all the cars”, “Carl pick up the story books and put them on the shelf”, and “Suzy pick up all the puppets.” When an adult can break the mess down into categories it is quickly conquered. After working together for several weeks, the kids should be able to be started on cleaning up and the adult should be able to walk away but stay close and redirect if necessary. Over time it will get easier, and the children will need less and less direction.
What kinds of homes do toys need? Toy boxes and large baskets only lead to dumping everything to find the missing toy on the bottom of the basket or box, I encourage parents and providers to not use this type of storage. Cube storage is better as is shelving with baskets. The number of toys out at one time is going to depend on the ages of the children. But it comes down to the number of toys need to be a manageable amount for the child/children to put away independently. In our program, we currently have six children under three. We have an eight-cube shelf with four medium-sized baskets that hold Magna tiles, cars, puppets, and blocks, and another smaller basket holds infant explorations activities. The other cubes hold three larger trucks, a shape sorter, a ring stacker, stacking cups, a mirror, a bottle with wooden objects to put in it, and a tray with a wooden balance toy and objects to balance on it. We also have a slightly larger basket with some dress-up materials and scarves in it. A baby doll bed and two dolls. It does get messy while they are all playing but they all know where the toys belong and can clean up when the time comes. We have found that at times when the kids don’t want to clean up it is usually because there is too much out, and they are overwhelmed. These toys are rotated monthly. All current toys do not necessarily get put away when we rotate toys. We watch their play for a few days before the toy rotation making mental notes of what they are playing with and what they aren’t using.
But why is it so important to teach this skill? Let’s look at all the skills they are learning when they are cleaning up and putting those toys away. They are learning to match like objects, all the cars go in this basket. They are learning associations; all the baby doll stuff goes in the left bottom cube. They are learning if they want to find the toys the next time, they need to put them away correctly. They are learning cooperation as they work together. The children learn very early on that when they don’t clean up toys get broken, and they trip on them and get hurt. So, by cleaning up they are taking care of the materials they play with, and they are keeping everyone safe.
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