Spring has ignited this massive force of decluttering in me this year. Truth be told, the desire for less stuff, less cleaning, less putting away, just less of my life spent managing and organizing my stuff has been lurking for a number of years now. I want less stuff, and more room for mental space free from the anxiety of what lurks behind the closet doors I can barely push shut.
When my husband and I were pregnant with our first son, I remember thinking that we didn’t have a single kid item. I remember being at a friend’s place with kids and witnessing all the toys and things that I thought we lacked and needed. Somehow, five years later we have tipped the balance from “no kid stuff” to “kid stuff “oozing out of every nook and cranny!
I’m fairly ‘type A’, so I like to keep all the toys organized all the time. A place for everything and everything in its place. We have a bin for wood blocks. A bin for cars. A toy box for stuffies. A bin for people. The farm and farm animals. The LEGO. The train track. The kitchen. The tool bench and tools …. the list goes embarrassingly on.
This system seemed to work for me until my first child was about 2.5 years old. However, once you add more kids and greater mobility for those kids, it seems the faster and greater the reach their force of destruction can reach. What I seemed to witness more often than not, was that my kids would play, often creating some kind of fort or ship or house and it would involve dumping all of the toys they could get their hands on in their fort or ship or house. I would enlist their help after this play to put things away and we’d start again the next day. More often than not, this would mean they would help nominally, and after everyone was in bed and after I had cleaned up from supper, I would then tackle this toy explosion.
On one hand, I love that my kids are creating their own creative play. I love that they are using their imaginations and creating an open-ended play scenario that allows them to play at something indefinitely and practice playing different roles and emotions. On the other hand… I AM DONE SORTING THESE TOYS BACK TO THEIR SPOTS EVERY DAY!
I have friends that are so much better at letting this all go, and I truly look up to them. I think they are probably more evolved than I am, and I wish that I was even half as relaxed. I realized however, that physical clutter creates real low level anxiety for me.
I have also noticed that my children will create a game and pretend play with whatever is around. They don’t actually need this many toys. In some cases the toys hinder them. Sometimes it seems like there is just too much stuff. Too much distraction to flit from one thing to the next. So, a year ago I started to slowly reduce the number of toys that we had. At first, I reduced the toys by about 50%. I organized them and put them away in a our storage room with the christmas decorations. I was expecting a lot of backlash. I was surprised when my children didn’t notice at all. This helped, but my kids were still using most of their toys to just dump out and I realized that there was still just too much stuff.
The weather has been nice lately and we’ve been spending as much time as we can outside. each day I find that my children want to stay longer and are playing more and more creatively and independently. They are using sticks and rocks to build the scenarios their imaginations are dreaming up . Today my one son created a construction site with roads out of scrap wood and sticks. He used rocks as pylons to mark off where the construction site was. The day before, my two older boys pulled their kayak out into the puddles in our yard and used sticks to fish with. This game evolved and went on for hours. Witnessing this just reinforced for me, how kids don’t need things, they just need space to create.
I am not advocating that children shouldn’t have any toys. However, in my case I have elected to remove all of the toys with the exception of one or two items at a time. I have left the play stations like the tool bench and the play kitchen, but I’ve stripped away all the extra “stuff”.
The other things that I am very conscious of about stuff, is that I want my children to truly have the opportunity to appreciate what they have. I have come to realize that giving my kids too much, takes away from their ability to truly appreciate what they have. I also am very conscious of wanting to create a childhood for my kids that is about experiences and connection. I don’t want to get lost in a sea of things that take away from focussing on these two things that are so much more important. Lastly, I feel it’s important to do our part to reduce waste. Educating about how we each can do our part to reduce waste and how we manage it is something we are trying to learn more and do more about in our family.
We are fortunate to have a storage space so I can try this approach on for size before I permanently get rid of things by donating or selling items. So far, I have to say, so good. My kids are more focussed and their pretend play is growing like any other muscle does. We have cleared the space of all the toys that suggest play occur in a certain way, and created a blank canvas. The experience has been liberating for our entire family. I am not perpetually cleaning or cringing at how my children are playing. They aren’t feeling me cringe or reflect on the “mess”.
All in all, I think its worth a try!
As always, I hope you are flourishing lately.