Okay, Doper parents, I am looking to you for some help.
As I may have mentioned (a lot, I know) I adopted a 6 & 7 year old at the beginning of the year. They came with a lot of toys, got more for their birthdays and now Christmas is coming.
I know toys are fun and an important part of being a kid but…
…you see we live in a 1300 sq ft home. We live there because it is affordable and moving is not an option. I have pared down all my ‘stuff.’ I have forced my husband to do the same.
I feel terrible about getting the kids to do the same with their toys.
So, help a new parent out. How do you do it (or do you)? Any tip or small bit of guidance to pass to a new parent is greatly appreciated.
I just shuffle my feet when I walk; it greatly lowers the chances of tripping on something. . .
Seriously thouhg, you need vertical storage options. Check out some of the shelving options at Ikea. The ones with matching baskets are great as the kids can pull out the “music” basket or the “lego” basket and have everything they need accessible.
My eyes, or rather my brain, read the thread title as Christmas Wookies, and for a moment there, I thought it was going to be about that horrible Star Wars Christmas special…
Vertical storage, Also, a talk about picking out some of their things to give to childen in need. From what I’ve read, that ought to be a salient idea for them.
Shelving and vertical storage. Just because you pared down as an adult doesn’t mean you should make children pair down. They won’t understand it. It may kick in “we’re poor again” fears/paranoia they had as youngsters.
They each have a 12 foot long 3 foot tall ikea storage unit (they are full). They each have two large bins in their closet for bigger toys (also full).
All toys are sorted to type (legos with legos, etc.)
They haven’t been poor in their memories (they were in a good foster home for a long time before they got here, don’t get me started on the system).
But the foster mom (bless her soul for all that she has done for my children and for the sacrifices she makes in her life to help others) is an unadulterated pack rat. Which my kids have picked up.
Teaching them to let go of things–especially for a good cause–would be a tremendous gift, even though they might not appreciate it now. Seriously, being able to let go of crap is a big asset in life.
I finally had to tell my two that nothing more could come into their rooms without something going out. Once a year, they each chose a pile of stuff to give away - usually to their younger cousins, so that pleased them somewhat.
For one child this process was pretty easy; the other one agonized over each and every Happy Meal toy. It really stinks, though, when when they want to give away the stuff that *you *like, and paid a fortune for. (“What do you mean, you don’t want the Playmobil Knights set anymore?!”)
It gets easier as they get older, because the toys get smaller. Video games don’t take up much room, for instance.
My kids are the same age as yours. Even though we aren’t well off, between all the grandparents, aunts and uncles my kids have some serious loot. Before Christmas I remind them of the reason for the season and they donate a garbage bag full of toys to make room for the new stuff. Also, once or twice a year I go in their rooms while they’re at school armed with garbage bags and pick out all the junk. Broken, missing pieces, too babyish, don’t play with, whatever. I usually get about two bags per kid. Now you say you’re an organizational whiz, which I am definitely not, so you may not get as much, but it does help. The kids have never noticed all the missing stuff, just that they have clean rooms.
Word. I’m not buying lindsaybluth’s post, either - sounds like they have plenty of stuff.
One suggestion you could try is to have them pile their stuff into three piles: Keep, Donate, and Meh. Keep is stuff they lovelovelove, Donate goes to other children who might enjoy a new toy … and Meh goes into a box. See if they miss anything in there after a week or a month, and if they do, the toys at least will seem a little “fresh.”
Whoops, I’m sorry, I thought your kids were Russian for some reason. My apologies. In THAT case, you wanna nip that behavior RIGHT in the bud. Don’t hesitate to do what the Lorax recommended; it’s what I’ve gotten my future MIL to do with her youngest. Fact: you do not need four versions of Monopoly.
Make the child throw away one toy for each infraction of The Rules. Be sure The Rules are well known ahead of time so that they gain a sense of responsibility for their actions, and are arcane and contradictory enough so that they lose at least two toys per week. Collect their tears in a glass vial (preferably at midnight) to use in potions, chili, and as an octane booster in your car.
I know that most people now days don’t want to hear it, but I had a small chest of about half the size of an army foot locker, or one of those nice brass edged decorative cube chests. My brother had the same size chest. We had a record player and 9 or 10 albums and 45s stuff people gave us randomly] and a shelf unit of books. We each had a desk for doing homework. This was when we shared a play room, before we moved when I was 9.
We took a toy out, played with it then put it back and got a new one out. We really didn’t have that many toys, unlike today when kids seem to have hundreds of toys.
I don’t have children.
I believe that kids who are starting to become overwhelmed with toys should have to pare down what they have before Christmas. Allowing them to keep every little toy they have is only going to teach them to be a pack rat. It’s ok to develop an emotional attachment to a toy (for instance, I am 30 and my first teddy bear still lives on my bed-side table). But, if you try to throw out a toy your kid hasn’t touched in a few months and they pitch a fit because “IT’S MY FAAAAAAAAAVORITEEEEEEE!!!”, then it’s a problem that needs to be dealt with.
Then again, there’s a reason why I don’t have children so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Another non-parent chipping in because we always have the best advice for child rearing.
From what I’ve heard some kids have big issues with the permanence of disposing of a toy. They may not have played with it for months or even years, but when you raise the issue of getting rid of it, they go into a panic. Let’s face it - children do not have a sense of proportion. Throwing out a five year old toy can seem as traumatic a loss to them as losing a leg.
So consider the possibility of packing stuff away in deep storage. Pack up a big bin of unused toys and stow it away in some unused corner of the basement or attic or garage. You will have reduced the immediate clutter in the living areas of your house. But the child won’t experience any sense of loss because the stuff you packed away is still “his” even if he doesn’t have it at hand. Ten or fifteen years from now, when he’s moved away from home, you can clear out the basement without it being a major issue. And who knows, maybe by then you’ll find you have a box full of collectibles you can sell on eBay.
You think you have problems? When our kids were little my wife reviewed toys for a column she syndicated. One year she got a box with every toy Mattel made. Our kids didn’t say “can you buy me that” they said “can you review that?”
But a good idea, especially at that age, is to take a bunch of toys and put them into some type of storage. A few months after Christmas, when they are getting bored, swap the new toys with the old toys. The old ones will seem new, and you have a holiday several times a year for free. We read this suggestion somewhere, and it works great.
I grew up donating stuff to Amvets all the time and it didn’t traumatize me. I am the antithesis of a pack rat because my philosophy is that everything I own must fit into two car trips or less (I’ve been moving on average more than once a year since hitting adulthood, maybe I’ll be more lax if I ever own a home). Just tell your kids that you have a family commitment to helping out the less fortunate, especially at Christmastime, and they need to go through their toys/clothes and decide what they can give away to make room for new stuff. Don’t phrase it as something optional or negative. Just say every toy they can bear to part with is another toy that a little boy or girl who doesn’t have any toys at all will get to play with.
Also, don’t harangue them if they choose to give away something you don’t think they should (like a book from grandma or a toy from precious old Auntie Nell)–this will lead to increasing packrat tendencies because they’re afraid they won’t please Mommy if they give away the “wrong thing”. If they try to give away something you want to keep, go through the bags later and squirrel it away in your garage (or wherever). Don’t assume that something has intrinsic value to them just because it does for you.
Clutter guru Don Aslett recommends using an “Emotional Withdrawal Box.” Say your child has toys that they really don’t use any more, but when it actually comes time to give it away, they can’t let go. So you put the toys in a cardboard box, tape it up, and hide it for a month. At the end of the month, if without opening the box the child can identify something in there they still want, you take it out and keep it. Most likely everything in the box will be forgotten, and the entire thing can be donated.
It’s somewhat dated, but Aslett’s “Clutter’s Last Stand” is still a good read. He emphasizes** dejunking**, not organization.
I definitely support the idea of giving the kids a box or bag and asking them to pick out some toys they would be willing to give to less fortunate kids. I think that will teach them a good lesson about holiday giving and if they are the ones who make the decision about which toys to give away then it will probably be less upsetting than if you were to pick them out.
