My kids are at camp this week (!!!) and my ‘vacation’ will be spend cleaning their rooms.
Our son has a small room and he is quite neat to deal with. It is just an overflow of books that is the issue. Books are a passion of mine and his and he has a huge bookcase that contains everything. I just weed out the baby and chapter books to give to the library. (I cannot wait until his OCD of Pokemon is over, that is nearly a shelf in itself.)
Our daughter, OTOH, who is 9, has a huge bedroom that is laden with shit and more shit. Alot of it is clothes. We are very fortunate that 90% of her clothing comes from teenagers who are quite fashionable. My daughter is a fashion plate bar none. She also gets a buttload of clothing every season from the two grandmas (one is a walmart shopper who buy more of whatever I had just bought for the kids for the new season - via salvation army - and the kids love her stuff more. The other garage sales and she picks up utter and complete shit for my kids. It’s my mom and she tries to dress them like she dressed by brothers in the 50’s and 60’s. GAY!)
But there is alot of little shit. She won’t part with old toys. Old dolls. Old stuffed animals and to be honest, I remember my mom purging my clutter without consulting me and it was very hard to deal with having no control over such things. I was the only girl in my neighborhood full of boys and had a family full of boys, so my girlie sanctuary was my dolls, stuffed animals and doll house. I played for hours on end with my girlie stuff.
She gave away my bike ( MY GREEN BANANA SEAT BIKE with a sparkly seat and tassles to my neices without consulting me at all. My GREEN BANANA SEAT BIKE!!! Ohhh, I’m not bitter about it to this day…no siree!)
So I have created this problem and now it is a monster. Her room is laden with furniture that has all been given to her. Husband and daughter cannot say no to anyone at all. Every square inch of wall space is covered with furniture. The cheapie stuff from a megastore. The only nice stuff is a nice dresser from Ikea and my childhood bookcase which is being used as a cat area. I could toss her bed out, too, but we are broker than a broke ho right now, so a new bed ( loft is what we all want for her.) is out of the question, so is painting the room as well.) How do I get past over-sentimentalizing every freaking thing? Prosac? Beer? Berzerker Rage?
I have a utlity trailer in the garage waiting to be laden with crap for goodwill. It is currently empty and I have until Thursday night to fill it up.
Help me Obi Wan!
You should not clean their rooms without them being there…you yourself have bad memories of your mother purging your clutter and you having no control.
Wait for them to get back and have them divide their clutter into three piles
Stuff they don’t want, which you can either throw out or donate.
Stuff they don’t want to get rid of, but will accept being stuffed into a box and put away someplace safe.
Stuff they want in their rooms, either in a drawer or in plain sight all the time.
The important thing is to LET THEM DECIDE WHICH STUFF GOES INTO WHICH PILE.
For the record, my daughter is now 26 years old and still will not let us dispose of her My Little Pony collection. They are, however, safely packed away, out of sight and out of mind.
You are having a pronoun problem. Pronoun problems are indicative of many power struggles. You say she cannot get rid of anything. You say it is your husband and daughter’s problem. But you ask for help for yourself. This is a problem.
I told my 9 year old that if he sold all his old stuff on the dutch version of ebay he could probably make enough money to buy another thing he wanted very badly without having to wait on his pocket money to mount up. That did it, his sentimentality lasted about a nanosecond after that.
The other option is the one that worked with my 7 year old; it is to pack everything away and give it back to him one bag at a time, to sort through. He didn’t get another bag until the contents of the last one were put away or otherwise disposed of. His problem was that they were just too big for him.
You have decided that you are going to get rid of her stuff, it appears, so you just need to do it and take the consequences. As your mother did.
However, you are in a different situation; for whatever reason you have decided to do this.
How about a middle-of-the-road approach? What if you weed out her room this week while she’s gone, but keep the stuff in the trailer/your garage until she gets back? Make her room look really nice and neat and so she can find things. When you pick her up from camp, tell her that you did this, but that you’ve kept her stuff FOR NOW. See if she likes having the room clean and playable. Set a time limit on how long you’ll keep her stuff. If she ever wants something that’s in the trailer, have her write down the item and the date she wanted it (don’t let her go through the stuff herself, she’ll want everything!). At the end of 3 months (or whatever your time limit is), she can have x number of the things from the list she’s made. And maybe at that time, you go through the stuff with her, and let her keep x number of things she hadn’t thought about. But be firm!
I wish my folks had made me weed stuff out more when I was a kid. I’m a terrible clutterbug, and I wish decluttering was a skill I’d learned earlier.
Don’t know your financial situation or your kid’s computer savvy, but to me that sounds like a lot more trouble than it would be worth.
The 3 piles solution sounds like a good one. Unfortunately it would not work well with the kid gone. My wife regularly went through my kids’ closets with them - pretty much every spring and fall - to see what clothes they needed for school/summer. At that time, we pretty ruthlessly get rid of things that no longer fit, are worn, or out of style. It is a pain in the butt and the kids hate to do it, but it keeps the volume of stuff under control.
And they each have limited amounts of space - a drawer or 2, that they can fiull with whatever they want. But pretty much everything else must be regularly decided to be kept or not. My FIL is an AMAZING packrat, so he set an example that make us pretty strict about getting rid of what we don’t use/need.
Once you get the room cleaned up, you realize you need to work to keep it from just getting recluttered. One thing that worked well for us were to make sure the kids had their rooms set up well for storage. We considered closet organizers and other storage systems well worth the cost. Second, my wife told our kids that so long as they kept their rooms clean (to our standards) we would respect their privacy and not have any need to look through their stuff. But if we needed to clean up their rooms, that would probably necessitate that we look though everything . . .
And IMO folk are overstating the trauma of a parent tossing a kid’s stuff. It seems just about everyone has a similar story, and yet they survive just fine. Hell, if nothing else, it gives you something relatively minor to bitch about your parents later. In my case, my mom kept all manner of stuff from my childhood. And when she gave it to me, I then had to toss it. It is just stuff.
People survive all sorts of terribly traumatizing things. That doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. (Now, I’m not saying that donating something your child would rather you’d saved is terribly traumatizing, either.) The problem is that a parent has no way of knowing which items the child is particularly attached to–if anyone is making the decision about what stays and what goes, it should be the child.
The way we dealt with our stuffed animal problem was to put most of them in bags and store them. Tell your daughter that she could have the ones she really missed back in three months. If she really cares, she’ll remember. I’m betting she won’t even remember most of the junk by then.
For clothes, make note of the stuff she actually wears, probably a small subset, and after a while put the rest in bags, to store until she outgrows it - then sell it. I don’t know what to say about the furniture - I can’t conceive of anyone wanting to be stuck in a room where they can hardly move for it.
Our kids had a ton of toys and games from my wife’s toy reviewing days. We finally decided to rotate some through the attic so the living room shelves looked reasonably presentable. Every so often we’d swap the ones not played with for ones from storage. It worked very well.
You know, for me the trauma did not play into it at all. It never occurred to me that it was my job to decide what my kid should get to keep and what he should get rid of, any more than it is my job to decide what my spouse keeps or gets rid of. It is my job to teach them how to deal with the stuff they accumulate, which process is not assisted by my deciding in their absence what goes and what stays.
I did organize their rooms for them when they were small and they have kept the same system more or less. A room which is clearly organized in a way a child understands is easier for the child to clean. And again when they were little I rotated their toys, because they had far too many for them to enjoy. But at 9 and 7, it is well within their capacity though sometimes I have to break it into smaller steps for the little guy as he is easily overwhelmed and does nto know where to start.
I don’t have a story like that because my mother felt the same way, it never crossed her mind to get rid of our stuff. She never opened my mail, either.
Though clothes have never been an issue for my own children, the stuff Thing One grows out of goes to Thing Two, the stuff Thing Two destroys goes into the garbage. Little by way of clothing survives Thing Two as he is what doting grandmothers like to call “all boy”.
The actual posting of the stuff is no trouble at all, a couple of clicks and you are done. Answering phone calls and keeping track of who gets what and how required some support, but was not all that complicated. It was less work than a garage sale (but dutch guys don’t have garage sales as far as I can tell).
Well, the parent can certainly set the **amount **that has to go–I’m just saying that once they’ve decided how much it needs to be cut down by, the kid should be the one to decide which items fall into which category.
First weed out clothes that are obviously not going to be worn. Too small, too slutty (Britney Spears skirt! Thanks, grandma!), too ratty. Get rid of those. Box up (by catagory) toys, games, stuffed animals and dolls. Tell her she can chose X number of each from the box to keep (10 stuffies, 7 board games, whatever). But only that number. And that, in the future, if she wants something new, something old has to leave her room.
This is what I came to say. Put a limit on how many things she can have and stay strict with it. It will teach her to prioritize and now overconsume and those are traits that will come in handy in the future.
I also would go with the rule that when one thing enters the room, one thing leaves. It will make them better at making choices and thinking those things through. It also keeps things from building clutter to where the mess is overwhelming. Psychiatrists are very firm that clutter in your home is not psychologically healthy.
After purging her clothing of all the old, inappropriate, damaged, and just plain not worn be sure to hang her clothing so that the hangers all point the same way. When you wash an item and hang it back up, turn the hanger on that item in the opposite direction. After a month you’ll be able to see what she has worn and what she has not. After another month you can show her what items she hasn’t worn and those can go since they haven’t been used in two months.
One kinda side note, where is all of this stuff coming from? The OP says
One way to limit the amount of stuff is to ask folk not to give her as much, and to have the kid pay for more of her own stuff. At 9, isn’t she growing and don’t tastes/styles change fast enough that getting rid of old stuff is no big battle?
My husband built our son’s loft a couple of years ago in an afternoon out of spare wood from various projects. The thing could withstand a Class 5 hurricane.