The biggest mistake I used to make when decluttering with my kids
...and what I do now instead
Helping kids declutter their stuff is a complex. I would never claim that there was only one right way to do it. But I’m sure now that how I used to do it was very wrong!
And the moment where I realized just how wrong I was doing it was reading this sentence in Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K White1:
Do you know what questions aren’t the least bit helpful (like, at all)? “Why do you have this?” or “What were you thinking when you stuck this in here?”
Because, without realizing it, some version of asking those questions was how I had been starting almost every decluttering session with my kids!
I thought I was being helpful. I thought I was identifying the most obvious possible items, so my kids didn’t have to think so hard, and starting there. And, in my defense, the thing I was asking about was almost always something that, to an adult, would have been trash! Maybe a candy wrapper. Or a piece of packaging material from a toy they had gotten months ago. The sorts of things I got the impression that other parents wouldn’t have ever asked their kids about—but my kids seemed so attached to them, and I wanted to respect that!
And maybe you think I was being ridiculous by giving them a choice about whether to throw those things out. I’m still not sure whether I think I was being ridiculous!2
But I didn’t have to stop being ridiculous to start making progress—I just had to change my approach.
So, following Dana’s advice, I started to ask “What in here do you already know is trash?” and usually, once I wasn’t putting them on the defensive, they were more than willing to point some things out to me.
And then once we did that, I would move on to “easy stuff”. And there were inevitably things I didn't even have to ask them about—things that lived somewhere else in the home, but had ended up in the play area or in their rooms.
And we continued from there. Or not! Because often neither the kids nor I had much focus to work together for very long. But even if we stopped dealing with some trash and some easy stuff, the space got better. And we built momentum. I felt like I had invested in my relationship with my kid, and invested in my kid’s relationship with cleaning.
There’s a lot more that happened in the intervening years (which I hope to write more about), and I’m sure my kids and I still have plenty more to learn, but the upshot is that it worked. Now, my kids are happy when I come find them to work on their spaces, and they surprise me with what they’re willing to let go of. They even seem to have internalized that when they let things go, life is easier and they have more space.
And I’m so, so grateful I found Dana’s method and started asking better questions.
It was in the part on “Helping Others Declutter”. Not the chapter specifically on kids though, since my kids never got the memo that they didn’t get the memo that I was “in a position to direct the decluttering progress”.
But I do remember, not very fondly, a time that someone came into my room as a child and threw away some trash without asking me about it. Neurotic on my part? Probably! But my kids have gotten a lot of patterns from me, warts and all, and so now I consider it my job to carefully untangle those patterns with them together. And I will never apologize for that, no matter how scrupulous it seems.