Often we are nudged into action of some type by the change of seasons, an upcoming holiday, or other cyclic occurrences. Back-to-school time can present such an opportunity for us to work with our children in preparing their rooms for new clothes and the next school year’s collection of books and papers.
When there is a place for everything and things are in order and in control at home, children can experience a boost of confidence, helping them feel up to taking on the challenges of the next grade level at school. A good family slogan could well be, “Before it’s back to school, it’s first make way at home.”
Let’s talk about doing this under the categories of dejunking and organizing. We’ll also suggest some ideas for making this work fun and rewarding.
Dejunking
The number one enemy to an orderly room is too much stuff. Children’s rooms, particularly, can be classic examples of space being overrun by stuff: the floor is littered with stray socks and loose shoes; dresser drawers are coughing up T-shirts by the dozen; closets are bulging with outgrown and worn-out clothing; shelves are swamped with toys and stuffed animals; and under bed areas are hiding who knows what. Locating anything, vacuuming, and dusting, and keeping order are almost impossible tasks. Certainly the mess makes one tired just to look at it. The disorder takes its toll on one’s self respect. The answer is to undertake a dejunking.
Dejunking works well by following these six steps:
1. Work with each child.
- Avoid overwhelming, confusing, or discouraging a child by expecting him to do the work on his own.
- Teach as you work. Remember, the home should be like an apprentice shop where the parent as “master” teaches the child who is a “novice.”
- Clean the child’s room for him occasionally, thereby showing him how a clean and organized room should look. A visual example can clear up lots of confusion over what should be done.
- Be specific in giving assignments.
- Suggest to the child, “Let’s first work on your T-shirt drawer and sort the ones you’ve outgrown or worn out. We can decide if we pass them down to a younger child in the family, or place them in a ‘good will’ bag, or if we should discard them.”
- Offer your services by saying, “Let’s go through this box of school papers and select ten examples of your 'best work' and organize them in an indexed binder. The rest is now just a pile of papers so we’ll throw it out." (See “organizing” below for safe-keeping suggestions.)
- Provide some guidelines for sorting things out. For example, items that are worn out, broken, or no longer in use should be discarded.
- Be solution oriented and come up with creative approaches.
- Take photos of large or awkward items, discard the item and place the photo in a scrapbook. For example, a photo of a large poster, a science project, or a diorama from a history class could serve the purpose well.
- Help a child experience satisfaction by challenging him to create space organizers from resources around the house: boxes, cartons, etc.
- Give starting and stopping limits so the task won’t seem endless.
- Motivate your child by saying, “Before lunch let’s sort 20 items,” or “We’ll set a timer for a 10-minute blitz ands see how much we can get done before the buzzer goes off.”
- Work as a family team, each child rushing to pick up twenty (or whatever number) items.
- Make the work fun and rewarding.
- Let your child wear a little hand puppet (made from a sock or paper bag) as he picks up stray items. He will likely respond well to the novelty of telling the puppet what to do rather than someone telling him.
- Pretend to wind up a child, as if he were a wind up toy, and hear him giggle as he heads off to do a task.
- Make the clean-up a treasure hunt, encouraging the child to “find” something he thought was lost or something he had forgotten and now rediscovered.
- Challenge a child to find the fun himself by making up his own games. Remind him of Mary Poppins when she sang, “In every job to be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and [snap] the job’s a game.”
- Work to music. Several of our grandsons like to sing “YMCA” as they work. They do so with gusto and even stop what they’re doing to perform the actions. Some granddaughters work hardest when they pretend they are Cinderella or Orphan Annie and sing along with the sound track as they clean. It can be fun to sing “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White, and young children are motivated by the Barney song, “Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share.”
- Offer to pay a child “by the pound” for the amount of stuff he bags up to give away or discard.
- Provide an incentive by promising when the work is done you’ll enjoy something fun such as going swimming, watching a movie, baking brownies, or playing at the park.
- Help a child experience the joy of sharing by taking him with you to the charity drop-off facility and help him visualize a needy person experiencing comfort and warmth wearing a coat or sweater he donated.
6. Identify the intrinsic rewards
- Ask your child, “What have you learned from this project?” “How does an orderly room make you feel,” “What are the benefits from being neat and clean?” “In what way can this type of work help you when you grow up?”
Organizing
Organizing, according to the dictionary, is to create order from chaos, to put into working order, to put together and arrange. This is best done by finding a “home” for everything or in other words, assigning a place for everything and keeping everything in its place. In this way items are safe and can easily be found when needed.
Following are three suggested organizing tips:
- Double closet capacity by engaging the services of a closet organizing company; by purchasing “do it yourself” organizers; by adapting ideas in home builders catalogs, magazines, others’ houses; or by using your own creativity and ingenuity to “rig up” organizers.
- Install double rods in order for better space utilization, hanging blouses and shirts from the upper rod and skirts and pants from the lower.
- Install adjustable rods and shelves that can be raised as the child grows.
- Invest in wire racks for shoes.
- Install hooks for night clothes.
- Make drawers in dressers and desks more serviceable by using containers and organizers.
- Use containers to organize items in drawers so hair accessories don’t become scrambled with sweaters or paper clips don’t become mixed up with rubber bands, for example.
- Organizers help prevent the contents of a drawer from shifting each time the drawer is opened or closed.
- Design rooms to be more functional by furnishing them with helpful organizing items.
- Use self-sealing plastic bags to keep small pieces of games and puzzles together.
- Supply a waste basket.
- Supply a small clothes hamper.
- Buy or build bookshelves (don’t forget book ends).
- Create scrapbooks.
- Invest in a small file cabinet and/or indexed binders.
A child who loves to collect papers can learn early on to file them by subject. For example, one of our grandsons likes to write down football plays and has organized them in a small, portable plastic file cabinet. Encourage a child to learn to file important papers for Scouts, school, church, and other facets of his life.
- Invest in or improvise under-bed storage containers if space is limited. (Select containers with wheels for easy sliding in and out.)
- Create a treasure chest (memory box) by setting up a small trunk or storage container for each child’s favorite things. (See The Ultimate Career, chapter “The Organization of Things,” pg. 17.)
In addition to scrapbooks, a treasure chest can provide safe storage for three dimensional items such as a Scout shirt, keepsakes from great-grandparents and grandparents, a cherished doll or teddy bear or souvenirs from trips. A treasure chest can provide a
sense of security for a child. Furthermore, cherished treasures from the past can encourage a child to look for and cherish treasures in the future.
It is hoped that taking the above-mentioned steps will help a child gain even more than a clean, neat, organized room. Some benefits could be developing the habit of dejunking, realizing that dejunking needs to be a life-time process; learning early on the art of “selective saving” and proper storing; recognizing the advantages of traveling light (having too much stuff is a distraction and hindrance); enjoying the energizing power that accompanies order and organization; and experiencing the blessings that follow being a good steward over one’s possessions.
These are just some of the reasons why a good family slogan could well be, “Before it’s back to school, it’s first make way at home.”
Please see this column on September 11 th for Power Phrases — Powerful Principles