I have two boys that are nine and eleven. They are not minimalists. They aren’t even a little bit minimalist. I’ve tried my best. I really have. But it’s just not happening.
I’ve dejunked their room while they’ve been gone. I’ve even spent entire days walking them through the process of decluttering. I’ve explained the benefits of having less to clean if you own less stuff. Less cleaning and more family time seemed to have the largest appeal to them. So why is it that every time I go into their room it makes my poor, little, minimalist skin crawl?
Discovering My Role in My Kids’ Clutter
I sat down and tried to take an honest assessment of where we are as a family and why things seem so challenging in the kid clutter department. Where did I go wrong? Here are a few realizations I had:
- I didn’t raise minimalists from birth. When I latched onto minimalism, my kids were 10, 8, and 2. By that time, my oldest two kids already had their own habits and love of toys well established. It is so much easier to start when your kids are small. If you have younger children, take my advice and start setting up healthy habits now. Life only gets more complicated later.
- I can’t force minimalism on my kids. My parents, siblings, and grandmother that we live with are all pretty much the opposite of being minimalist. It even took my husband awhile to get used to my tendency of throwing things out. So it makes sense that my children wouldn’t instantly have the same love of decluttering that I found overnight.
- I helped create the clutter mentality in my kids. As hard as it is to admit, I made my kids the way they are:
– We designated an entire playroom in our home dedicated to toys. As they grew and their toys accumulated, I bought bins to organize the clutter.
– When the grandparents heaped on the toys at every gift giving occasion, we sat back and let it happen.
– I saved the toys my oldest son grew out of so my second son could enjoy them. In reality, new toys were purchased for him anyway so I just doubled our clutter.
– When the playroom got too full, we headed to IKEA to add more toy storage to their bedroom.
– When a birthday or Christmas was approaching, I threw out broken and annoyingly noisy toys. However, I wasn’t usually approaching it as deciding what they needed. Typically, I was just making some room for the next set of toys that I knew was coming.
I could now see my role in my kids clutter tendencies, but that didn’t frustrate me any less. I needed to understand where my kids were coming from so I could learn how to deal with the clutter issue.
Understanding Kids & Their Clutter
Kids like to accumulate. I wish it were true that kids don’t want stuff, but in my experience I haven’t found that to be the case. Certainly kids crave family time and nurturing but that doesn’t seem to replace a need to have possessions to call their own. Something is built in us to collect more and more of the things we love.
Kids find part of their identity in their stuff. I vividly remember when my oldest son decided he wanted to collect something. He didn’t really seem to care what it was, but it was very important to him that he had a collection that was completely his own. He first considered collecting glass bottles, then settled on collecting just bottle caps for awhile. Later he moved on to a small collection of baseball cards and then Star Wars figures. Now whenever anything new related to Star Wars comes out, he is instantly drawn to it.
Finding a connection to what you like carries over into the things you buy and accumulate. People who like to read tend to have lots of books. If you like to work out, you often have tons of work out clothing. If you like to work on computers, you tend to hang onto lots of extra computer parts and buy new gadgets just because you like them. That doesn’t make it bad that we find part of our identity in things. We just have to learn to acknowledge when it happens and realize we are far more than just a collection of things we own.
Children follow the examples they see. Our kids follow our example whether it’s a good example or a bad one. If they see spontaneous spending, hanging onto clutter, and a messy house then that’s what they will develop as their normal way of living. It’s challenging to break bad habits of our own, but it so much more frustrating and time consuming trying to help our kids change bad habits. Be careful not to build habits now that you don’t want to break later.
Emotional attachments start early. You know those photo albums you can’t part with, your grandmother’s china, or those little porcelain figurines that are still up in the attic? Whatever it is, we all have items we are emotionally attached to. It’s the same with our children. It surprised me how early my sons were emotionally attached to things. Sometimes the items seemed silly and meaningless to me, but for my sons they carried a story full of memories. We can’t under value those sentimental attachments. Keeping them in check is part of the challenge, but within limits our children should be allowed to have keepsakes of their own.
We won’t always share the same priorities. My basic minimalist belief is to “focus on what matters and get rid of the rest.” Star Wars and video games don’t matter to me. Most days I find them pretty annoying if I’m being honest. Secretly I would love to get rid of most of what fills my boys’ room. However, that would be focusing on what matters to ME . . . and not respecting what matters to them. The days of stuffed animals and board books that they won’t notice if they went missing are long gone. Now the job is to find a happy middle ground for us all.
So how do you deal with older kids and their clutter and find that happy middle ground? I’m so glad you asked, but you’ll have to stay tuned for part two.
If you’d like to learn more about minimalist living, please consider reading my book, Family-Sized Minimalism or subscribing to the RSS or the weekly update newsletter in the sidebar. Thanks so much for reading.
Article originally published on 05/11/2011
