Children rooms (4) - clothing

After looking to get a better understanding of how your child’s room functions and what the different areas could be, you have seen a couple of tips on how to address the mess in a way that does not antagonise your child from the go. These things were pretty much about what is special in your child’s room and how it is different from your own bedroom and we have not yet addressed one area that appears to be very similar to one of the eternal adult clutter bugs: clothes!

At first sight, children’s clothing seems to follow similar rules and issues as adult clothes do, but that is really far from the truth: for one thing, there is a true need to sift through their clothes regularly simply because children grow so quickly and clothes that fit a couple of months ago may already be too small for comfort. Personally, I believe that is an advantage, as it teaches an understanding that we only ever need a couple of each to get through the time it takes for the next laundry day to come along – a concept that eludes many adults and leads to overstuffed wardrobes and drawers across the nations. So, let’s have a good look at the clothes your child owns.

Before you even start sorting and organising, give this first idea some thought: if you regularly find laundry on the floor of your child’s room, make sure to either have a laundry basked in the room, or teach your child to put those dirty clothes into the big laundry basket you surely have around your home somewhere. I’m very much in favour of the second approach because it holds a good cleaning up lesson, it removes that one chore from your own list, and also because the room already has so many functions that you really do not want to add another one that only takes up more space. Either way, doing this will already reduce the number of clothes in the room.

Step #1

Take all the clothes out of the wardrobe and drawers and sort by type: socks, undies, t-shirts, trousers, shirts, pullovers, etc. If there isn’t enough space to do this, either find another place in the house or simply do this one category at a time, e.g. only socks, then shirts, etc.

Step #2

Within each category, determine if something does not fit (any more) or that is beyond repair and place into a box to look at later.

So far, you could have done this on your own, without any involvement of your child – although I recommend that he/she participates in this initial exercise simply to get used to the idea that these things need doing occasionally.

Step #3

If a category contains a lot more items that strictly necessary, it may be time to look at the pile more closely. There could be all kinds of reasons why there are so many items here: overbuying, lack of use, nostalgia, people giving similar gifts or pure randomness. All of those can be addressed, of course: think before you buy, make sure you don’t get too many of these if the child doesn’t really like to wear them, ask people for gifts that are more useful, …

Be that as it will, you might want to cut some of those items out and reduce the pile to something more realistic. Of course, this is where your child also has to have a say.

Find out if there is a particular emotional attachment to either of the clothes – your daughter might have met her best friend forever wearing that dress, and your son’s favourite StarWars T-shirt might be battered but he wears it all the time, regardless. Don’t forget, it is THEIR wardrobe in the first place and some of their decisions might be tough on you, but you can still retain a certain level of control while taking their wishes into consideration.

Finding a home for each item or category is similar to the one employed for toys: “where would you look for these sweaters?”, “do you really need all of these?”, etc. At the end of the exercise, you should have a wardrobe, dresser or chest of drawers that contains only currently used, clean and presentable (well, except for that StarWars T-shirt, that is) clothes ready to be found and worn.

That leaves one loose thread: the box from step two! While it may only contain clothes that don’t fit or are damaged, there could be an emotional reason for your child to keep at least some of them.

It’s up to you if you bring up that box now, later or never depends to some degreen on the age of your child. If we are looking at a toddler or a pre-schooler, and they have not mentioned anything missing in step three, there might be a rationale to keep the box out of sight for a couple of weeks or months, and then summarily dispose of it if the child never asks about any of the ‘missing’ items. However, slightly older children might rebel against your choice to remove something they might not actually want or need, simply because they were not involved in the decision. As a parent, you know your children best, and you probably know which approach works for each of your children separately.

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

• Clutter Hack: getting to know your wardrobe
  
• It's all in the mind
  
• Two of each is one too many