Helping Our Children to Organize

At around six years old my son made a great comment to me about tackling his messy kindergarten desk at school.  He said, "I thought my desk was impossible to clean so I didn't clean it.  When I tried it, it only took five minutes.  It was so much easier than I thought!  You can't judge things by how they look." 

Many professional organizing clients are adults who don't believe they received organizing skills as children.  How can we help our children learn to organize and develop good habits at a young age?

The first step is to show them how to organize.  We have to teach them to gather up items, put them where they belong and have plenty of storage available in different categories such as Legos, books, dolls, and dress-up.  The best example we can set is getting down on the floor and cleaning the items with our children.  Our participation makes the job go faster and seem less daunting.  Another idea is starting them early in unpacking their school backpacks, deciding what to keep and what to recycle and posting important papers.  Learning to part with papers now will make it easier as our children grow older.  Teaching our children to break tasks into smaller ones can also empower them to tackle large jobs.  As children progress in school, they will have homework assignments that are due in a number of weeks so planning the timeline to complete smaller parts will help the child learn to do a little each day and finish the large assignment.

 Giving our children some organizing assistance at a young age will help them grow up with these essential skills...and keep them from avoiding cleaning out their desks and tackling papers as adults!