These 11 tips to keep your house clean with kids are sure to come in handy during the updated lockdown restrictions since schools are temporarily closed!
1) Declutter Once, then Declutter Regularly.
The more stuff in your house, the harder it will be for your kids to learn where things belong and be able to put them away on their own. My favourite place to start is in the bathroom because you get to throw away a lot of stuff and most of it is not sentimental. If you make it through the entire house, you might think you’re done. But if you want a clean house, you have to embrace the concept that decluttering is never done (especially when you have kids!).
2) Everything has a place, and everyone knows the place.
You probably know that catchy phrase: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
As cliché as it sounds, it really does work, but If and only if, everyone in your family knows its place. The real trick is to make the “place” make sense, both to you and to your family.
If you put the coffee mugs at the opposite end of the kitchen from the coffee maker, it doesn’t make sense. If you put the coat rack across the room from the door, those coats are most likely going to be dropped on the floor.
Observe your family’s habits and organize your home in a way that fits those habits (not necessarily your habits).
3) Rotate toys, or create a toy checkout system.
After we finished decluttering our toys, we still had more than I wanted to keep out all the time. After a few weeks of going crazy, I decided to establish a toy checkout system.
4) Keep baskets and racks kid-accessible.
If your kids can’t reach the coat rack, they are probably not going to be very inclined to hang up their coats. If the dishes are out of reach (even with a stool), they can’t put away the dishes from the dishwasher.
If at all possible, buy kid-height hooks and coat stands. Organize your kitchen so they can reach their own dishes.
Use open bins so they don’t need to struggle with lids to help tidy up the house.
5) Establish cleaning routines.
If you haven’t established cleaning routines yet, you need to! (Don’t feel bad)
Daily cleaning routines work best when worked into your morning and evening routines. You want them to become a habit – to feel like something is missing when you don’t do them.
Daily cleaning routines keep clutter at bay so that your weekly cleaning routine takes far less time. A weekly cleaning routine generally takes on actual deep cleaning, as opposed to tidying.
As your kids grow, they can take on more responsibilities, especially in your weekly cleaning routine. You also can teach them to develop their own daily cleaning routines that will keep their spaces clean and organized.
6) Clear your surfaces.
Clutter loves company. When your surfaces are covered in knick-knacks, it’s so tempting to set something down next to those knick-knacks. After all, the surface wasn’t clear to begin with. What harm is there in adding one more thing, just for a minute?
One more leads to one more, and all of a sudden, you have a clutter magnet that has attracted every random object your family was too busy to return to its proper place.
Keeping counters clear prevents clutter from accumulating where it doesn’t belong.
7) Keep your systems simple.
Kids stay organized when the organization systems are simple. They need to be easy to understand and uncomplicated.
While most moms may love sorting all the toys into 15 different bins (colour-coded for the win!), a child will spend twenty minutes standing in front of them with his toy hammer wondering which one it goes in.
You want to make clean-up fast and efficient. The fewer categories and bins there are, the better.
8) Create systems to quickly corral clutter until it can be put away.
We encourage the use of EMPTY bins and baskets throughout the home to corral clutter. As you are tidying up throughout the day, you can put things in the appropriate bin.
About once a week or so, take each bin to the appropriate room and put away the contents. This saves so much time and energy, as its much easier to carry a single bin to the room once a week than run multiple items up and down the stairs all day.
9) Teach kids how to clean their rooms.
Try to teach your kids that Monday is “reset day”. Unless something unusual happens that week, Monday is the day to clean your house, including their rooms.
Walk them through each step of the cleaning process, and if they are working hard, “work hard beside them” (that’s the actual phrase I use). They are learning how to put things away, bring objects that don’t belong in their rooms to the appropriate places in our home, vacuum, and take out the trash.
10) Let your kids organize their own stuff.
Once kids hit a certain age, your organizational systems may no longer make sense to them.
Have you ever had someone clean a room for you and put things away where it made sense to them? I bet you couldn’t find a thing. Kids probably feel that way A LOT, they just don’t know how to express their frustration in words.
11) Remove dumping temptations from toddlers.
I admit that as you have older kids in the mix, this gets much harder to actually accomplish. Sometimes, your older kids will need things accessible. It’s harder to do in a small house as well. But if you want to keep your house clean with a toddler, remove as many dumping temptations as possible!
They do grow out of the dumping phase, I promise. But their dumping and exploring can drive you crazy, so find a different way to store your toys or remove the temptation altogether.
Keep your cupboards locked with safety clips, Put folded laundry basket up on a high dresser and keep just a few toys out and store the rest (then rotate them).
Keeping Your House Clean with Kids Takes Creative Thinking
You have the power to change how your home functions with creative thinking and flexibility. If something isn’t working, be innovative! Persist until you find a solution.
- Enlist the kids
- Change an organizational system
- Put certain toys away for a while
- Buy paper plates during busy seasons
- Require kids to clean up before having screentime
- Declutter your stuff
Sometimes, you just need to stop obsessing over having a clean house, especially when you’ve just had a new baby or made some other major life transition. Sometimes, you need to step over the toys and just WALK AWAY.
But I’m guessing if you’re reading this, those toys are driving you nuts. You can’t ignore the mess anymore, and you just don’t know how to fix it. These tips are a great start, but if you need someone to help you with your home cleaning need, we are here to save the day!
So stop spending your every waking moment cleaning your house, just give us a call and we will bring a professional cleaner right to your doorstep!
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Source: https://www.thissimplebalance.com/12-tips-to-keep-a-clean-house-with-kids-from-a-mom-of-4/