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Home › Articles › Parenting Strategies › Kick Out the Clutter

Kick Out the Clutter

How to Tame the Messiest
of Bedrooms

By Karen E. Baxter

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Keep your child involved in the process by letting him help you shop for any new furniture or containers that are needed and by showing him how the new storage systems will work to his benefit. If he has many baseball cards, for example, show him how a binder filled with plastic sleeves will make it easier to locate a particular card, share his latest finds with friends and keep his collection safe from spills, tears and tattering.

Then let him personalize the binder by decorating it with baseball theme pictures, so it will become as special to him as the cards themselves. Similarly, plastic containers can be personalized or color-coded and used for storing action figures, CDs, jewelry and stuffed animals.

Pace Yourself

Don't overwhelm yourself or your child by trying to tackle an entire room in one day. Instead, start with the areas that are most important in everyday life, focusing on a desk over a box of trinkets, for example.

Although your children may initially resist tidying up their messy bedrooms, the benefits – short and long term – are clear. The immediate payoff is that when busy families are pulled in so many directions, being organized can help reduce the overwhelming feeling that there's not time to do it all.

"And it's a good opportunity to teach skills that are life skills," Denton says. "I have clients who are corporate executives who say they wished they would have learned this when they were younger."


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