Tips for Teaching Your Child to Keep Your Their Room Clean

If you’re a parent you know well the struggle that is keeping a child’s bedroom clean. Stepping into a child’s bedroom can sometimes be a scary proposition. On those occasions when you’ve ventured into your child’s room and realized you couldn’t see the bedroom floor, it probably crossed your mind that you should always be wearing shoes as you never know what you’ll come across. Here are some clever tips for encouraging your child to keep their room clean so it doesn’t become an all-consuming project every time you walk into it.

Keep everything in a designated area

If you think this sounds way too organized for a bedroom you’re wrong. When kids don’t have a place to put their toys, books and clothes, their room will get increasingly messier. Depending on your personality, you have a number of options. You can designate a specific area for specific things such as a corner for books and the end of the bed for toys. You can also buy little buckets for toys, books and dirty clothes. You don’t need anything fancy, just places for items to be put when they’re not in use. This will encourage them to clean up and keep the room a little more organized and easier to clean up when the time comes.

Using a laundry basket

Put a laundry basket in every room in the house as this is one of the easiest ways to keep a bedroom tidy and clean. You can find cheap laundry baskets at the dollar store and places like Target and Wal-Mart. If you don’t want to buy one then check around the house for old boxes that you can dress up. Anything will work just as long as it will hold the clothes. Once you have laundry baskets to put in each room, teach your child what to do with it. Seriously, if you don’t teach them to put their dirty clothes in it, the basket will sit empty and the clothes will continue to sit on the floor. Show them where the clothes go every time they take them off. Teach them how to put their clean clothes away neatly and where to put the dirty ones. Half of the mess on a child’s floor is the clothes strewn across the floor. If you stop this habit before it starts, you will have almost half of the problem solved.

Play a game

If you have young children and you’re trying to teach the concepts of responsibility and picking their things up, you might have to be a little more creative. Kids love to play games make a game out of everything you do around the house. Here are some ideas to help make it more fun:
• Clean using colors. You call the color out and they have to find all the toys that color and put them away.
• Counting. Tell them you’ll count to 10 and you want to see how many toys they can pick up.
• Use a timer. Kids love to race against the clock so go ahead and time them to see how fast they can be at putting things away.
• Use a hula hoop. Sometimes the thought of cleaning everything up all at once is too overwhelming for kids so use a hula hoop to make it a little less stressful. Place the hula hoop on the floor and tell them to start by picking up only the things inside the hula hoop. Once that is done you can move the hula hoop somewhere else. Keep moving it until everything has been picked up.

Keep things picked up during the week

Instead of letting the bedroom sit all week make sure you have your children do small pickups during the week. This will cut back on how much time you spend doing everything on one particular day. If they can get into the habit of picking up as soon as they are finished with something, things will be a lot less overwhelming when cleaning day comes.

It’s definitely not easy to get your child to keep their room clean, but maybe these helpful hints will get your child to do a better job of cleaning their room and keeping it that way.