How to get your Kids to Clean their Room

Getting your kids to tidy their room will never be the easiest thing and to be fair do you enjoy the thought of tidying up? So you can understand why children may throw a tantrum when you tell them to tidy their room, so you need to be clever about it, think of things that will motivate them to clean their room or ways in which you can make it fun.

I remember when my Mum used to get me to tidy my room she would threaten me with the “you won’t be able to go out all weekend if you don’t tidy your room”, and at this point I was verging on teenage years so the thought of spending the weekend at home indoors with my parents really wasn’t fun! So it motivated me to clean my job and do a bloody good job! And then I got to spend the weekend with my friends.

Obviously with younger children it is a little different, but simple things like if you give your child a little bit of pocket money at the weekend to go and spend round the corner shop on sweets or if you take them with you grocery shopping and you buy them a toy or some sweets, tell them that they can’t have it until they clean and tidy their room. Trust me it works. Every child wants to get stuck into playing with their new toy so they will get straight into cleaning their room.

Another way to improve with your kids getting their chores done is to set a good example, show them that you clean and tidy up often and this will show them that it is the normal thing to do. If you don’t tidy up and don’t take pride in the way your home looks then it isn’t likely you’re going to be able to motivate your child to take pride in cleaning their room.

You could even make it a game, if you have several children, get a timer and tell them to have a race. The first person to have the perfectly cleaned room wins (perhaps offer a prize), every child loves bit of competition. You could also pretend to be judges and once the children have cleaned their rooms they have to be scored out of 10 and again whoever gets the highest score out of 10 wins.

There is so much you can do to motivate your children to clean their room, so fear not if they don’t seem to be cooperating at the moment, try a few of these tips out and hopefully in no time there will be no strops or tantrums just because you mentioned the “cleaning” word.

Decluttering your Home

Decluttering your home is never a fun thing to do, and when you tell the kids to declutter their rooms you know exactly why they groan and moan about it, because just like them you really don’t want to do it, do you? But it has to be done, over time we begin to gain things or buy things in which we needed at the time but no longer need, or we just buy something because we like the look of it. However, this begins to clutter up the house leaving you with no extra storage or makes your home a nightmare to keep tidy. So this is why you need to declutter.

It doesn’t have to be one of them things you keep putting off, there are ways to make it easier. Pick a starting point. Don’t start in one place and not finish but move on to the next space because this will just cause extra clutter everywhere and make your life so much more stressful. So maybe, pick a room you’re going to start with? You don’t have to do the whole house in one day, so maybe dedicate a room a week, or a room a day? Which ever takes your fancy.

For example, if you decide to start with the kitchen, go through one cupboard at a time, and have a black sack at the ready for anything you decide you want to throw away. During this process you need to be tough, don’t look at something and think just because you haven’t used it since you bought it, bearing in mind you bought it over a year ago, doesn’t mean you won’t use it. Because it is likely you won’t use it, and if you ever do randomly need something you decided to throw away you have friends and neighbours right? Borrow.

If you don’t feel like decluttering this week or this weekend, plan a weekend or a day in which you’re going to do it, and schedule it in. Knowing you have to do it and it is something that is scheduled in is likely to make you do it, plus the sooner you get it done the better, then you can stop worrying about it.

For items you aren’t so certain on create a “maybe” box or bag and pop everything in there. Pop this box or bag in a hidden place and in a few weeks or months go through it again and see what you actually need out of it, by this time you’ll have realised you don’t actually need any of it and it will be simple and easy for you to just get rid of it, thus creating more space in your home, and remember, some of the stuff you’re thinking of getting rid of you could donate to charity? This whole decluttering thing really does turn out to be good, and giving stuff to a good cause will make you feel great! 

Finally, don’t leave it to get to the point where you have to do a WHOLE long process of decluttering, perhaps every month set a day in which you’re going to have a little bit of a more thorough clean through, this will stop you from having to do so much work in one period of time.