When you have kids, trying to keep your home tidy is rather difficult. Also, people tell you.Having kids around and cleaning up after them is a never ending job. That is absolutely true, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. You can still maintain order and organization. You just have to A) be realistic with your expectations and B) learn to create a different kind of order among the chaos.
It is not easy to follow house cleaning tips or to constantly tidy up after children when you are therefore tidying from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. But if you reorganize it in your head, you’ll be able to keep an organized home even if it’s not entirely clean all day long. Let’s take a look at some tips to help you to get there.
- Your first problem is clutter. The biggest issue with an untidy home is the amount of stuff you have, and usually this can be combatted by decluttering the entire house. Reducing the overall amount of stuff in one space is going to immediately make a difference to how it looks. There’s nothing more difficult for a parent than feeling overwhelmed by piles of stuff. You can go through everything room to room, donating things, recycling things, and putting things into storage that you want to keep but you don’t want to keep being pulled out. Once you get into a routine of decluttering every single week, you can stay on top of the stuff and stop the buildup.
- Put together a cleaning schedule. Do you absolutely have to do laundry every single day? No. Instead, relegate laundry to a weekend job. Every single piece of laundry should be washed, dried, and put away by the end of Sunday. Anything that didn’t make the laundry baskets doesn’t get washed until the following weekend. Not only will this help to get older kids organised with their clothes, but this is your opportunity to teach those older kids how to do it themselves. Children need to take some ownership of chores anyway, so if you lighten your own load by only doing wash loads at the weekend, you can teach them to wash their own clothes so if something is forgotten or desperately needed, they can have the independence of using the washing machine themselves.
- Sort the daily from the weekly. There will always be cleaning items you have to do every single day. Making a list of the things that can wait until the weekend or wait to do once a week versus what needs to be done every single day can help you to monitor the chores more effectively. Even if you have younger children, they can get involved in tidying up after themselves. It’s nice for children to be children, but at the same time, if they live in the house, they have to take responsibility for their belongings and for themselves, which means that you have an opportunity to make sure that they get to the age of 18 knowing how to clean a house and look after themselves.
- Create the little habits that will stick. There are certain cleaning habits that will create a ripple effect in the rest of the house. Making the bed, for example, is something that everybody should be doing every morning. It’s something so small and yes, they’ll be getting back into the bed in the evening anyway, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be tidy through the day. Other small habits, such as getting the kids and the grown-ups to tidy away their mess after they’ve eaten is also important. This doesn’t mean that dishes need to be left on the counters by the sink, but teaches people to scrape their plates and load the dishwasher themselves. This way, not only does it take the load off your shoulders, but you can ensure that the dishwasher is ready to go. That would be your chore.
- Tidying is not the same as cleaning. An organised home is about it being in order, not necessarily clean. This means that no, you do not have to clean your skirting boards every single day, and no, you do not have to mop the walls every single day. Sure, if you see visible fingerprints, feel free to give them a wipe, but it is important to distinguish between tidying and cleaning. Cleaning and bleaching while the children are awake can often feel like you’re trying to wipe a baby’s butt while they’re still doing their business – futile! One thing that you have to remember is that if you work together to keep the place tidy then the cleanliness will follow.
- Not be tempted to do it alone. There is nothing worse than a mother, especially trying to do the whole house by themselves all the time. If you’ve got a full time job on top of that and you’re looking after the kids, then it just becomes far too much. And you are only one person. Every single person who lives in your home has responsibility for it, which means you cannot take everything on by yourself and you should absolutely delegate. You shouldn’t have to delegate to adults because if they have eyes they can see the mess. Children can do the same. Adopt an approach of ‘if you see it’s messy, you clean it’ which will help you to keep your home organized.
- Make sure that everything has a home. We talked about having too much stuff for his face, but it’s important that you recognise that everything needs to have its own home. Not only that, but the children especially should know where everything goes. This way, when it comes to the five minute cleanup after dinner, everybody knows where everything goes and it can be done very quickly. That’s the one thing to remember about an organised home. It doesn’t have to take very long at all.
- Have an open donation bin in the garage. Sometimes it can be difficult to just go round and start clearing things up to make sure that you have a donation pile to go to the charity shops. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by this task, have a large bin bought and put in the garage with a label on it for donation. This way, when the kids are ready to give something away, they can just pop it into the bin and you can do the same on your way to go and get the car or on your way to do some laundry. You can just lob things into the donation bin and know that the job is done.
- Incentivize it. Maintaining a clean house with children is not easy, but you can always give your kids an incentive. You don’t bribe them or pay them pocket money, because if you’re not being paid for household chores and they shouldn’t be either, but you can incentivize their overall participation and you can phrase it as working together for the benefit of the house. This way they feel like they are helping.
- Streamline your laundry. Clothing is one of the biggest build ups when you have a family, especially if you’ve got babies around. Instead of worrying about the mountain of clothing being done, I refer to our earlier tip of saving the laundry until the weekend if you can. If you can’t, invest in a good dryer so that you don’t have to worry about trying to hang laundry up around the house or outside in the winter months.
- Don’t settle for half done jobs. If you’ve delegated somebody to go to the laundry and sort out a wash, then it’s important that they don’t just put the laundry in the washer. A half done job is like taking the rubbish bag out to the outside bin only to not put a clean bag into the bed again. A half done job is doing the laundry but not taking it out of the washing machine and moving it to the dryer or hanging it up. Half done jobs are not allowed in your home. If you want to keep it organised and clean then everybody should be organised.
- Write everything down. When it comes to tasks that are multi step and you’re trying to teach the kids to do it, write it all down and stick it in the right places. For example, washing machine instructions can be written down and stuck onto the washer. Dishwasher instructions can be written down and stuck onto the dishwasher. When you have kids in the house, cleaning is a team sport. It’s not something that people just do on their own. You might still handle bigger jobs such as vacuuming, but they can bring their laundry to the washroom, they can tidy up after their own meals, and they can tidy up their toys as well.
If they’re complaining about it because there’s too much to do, then they didn’t keep up with it in the first place. And that’s not a you issue, that’s a them issue… No, we’re kidding. Parents have to keep on top of children and ensure that things are getting done. So keep it working together as a team and you can stay organised.
