Organizing your own room may not be a big deal for you, but organizing your child’s room may. This is because you are an adult, and to organize the room of your children, you need to think like a child. You need to see the furniture, storage and space from the vantage point of your child, and design strategies tailored to the little one’s needs. So, how to proceed?
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Here are some tips that will help you organize your child’s room properly and easily.
1. Design child-friendly solutions
To organize the room of your children well, the solutions you design must meet the children’s needs. Adult organizing systems and furniture don’t fulfill the needs of children well. Small hands find it hard to manage sticky dresser drawers. When handling folding closet doors, fingers of children get pinched, and the rails jump if pushed from bottom. Kids find closet hanging rods to be out of reach. Traditional toy boxes have scattered and mixed toy parts.
If your kid is quite young, remove the closet doors completely. Lower down the clothing rods and buy a few child-sized hangers, as adult-sized ones are not suitable to put children’s clothes. Use a few floor-level open boxes or containers for holding toys, and open baskets of plastic for storing socks and other clothing.
2. Make things hard to take and easy to keep
One of the most effective ways to ensure efficient storage in kids’ rooms is to make things easier to be put away than to take out. For instance, store the picture books in the form of a flip file in a dishpan made of plastic. The flip file should stand upright. When your kid needs a book, he/she will flip through all the books, choose one, and then toss the book before the dishpan after reading. This kind of storage is better than a traditional bookcase, in case of which children can pull down an entire book shelf easier and faster than replacing one book.
3. Arrange bottom to top
Considering the short stature of children, start arranging things from the room’s bottom to its top. Keep the most-used belongings and toys on the lower shelves, on the floor or in the lower drawers. Keep the things used less often on the higher levels.
4. Label everything
Using a computer printer, create simple graphic labels for your child to remember where what belongs. You can use pictures of blocks, dolls, shirts and socks to help your kid remember where the items belong. Use word labels of large-type to improve the reading skills of older kids. Put the labels everywhere – on bookcases, boxes, shelf edges, filing cubes and on the outside and inside of drawers. You can play “match the label” with your kid to make toy pickup a funny game.
5. Let your child participate in the organization process
Don’t carry out the organization process alone, and don’t scold your child for making a mess of his/her room as that will not solve the problem. Your aim should be teaching your kid maintenance and organization skills.
Let the organization process be a learning activity for the child. Be a guide for your kid and see what is working and what is not. Understand why your kid wants an organized room. Notice what is causing troubles and think what is important for your kid. Together with your kid, you can design an organization system and scheme in a better way, and the scheme will be suitable for your child. When kids participate in the process, they can understand the logic of organization in a better way, and are likely to keep their rooms organized.
6. Create maintenance routine
Your child should maintain his/her room regularly. The kid’s room may be clean, and then he/she plays and the room becomes a mess. It is frustrating for kids to clean extremely messy rooms, which can be the result if maintenance is not done regularly. So, create maintenance routine for everyday. For example, in the “Morning Pick-up”, your child has to put yesterday’s clothing to laundry, keep the pillow back to bed and do other such activities. In the “Evening Pick-up”, the child has to put away the toys he used during the day, before getting dressed for bed.
With these tips, you can not only organize the room of your children well yourself, but also help your kids to do so. It’s important for children to organize their rooms themselves to some extent, if not entirely, so that they can learn organization skills and use them as they grow up.
