Tips for Organizing Children’s Bedrooms

Keeping your children’s rooms clean and organized can be daunting and downright frustrating. How do you help your child organize and clean up life in the bedroom? Try our tips for getting children organized and help keep your Kansas City home under control.

To organize a child's room, solutions must fit the child. For younger children, remove closet doors entirely. Lower clothing rods and invest in child-sized hangers. Use floor-level open containers to hold toys, open plastic baskets to store socks and underwear.

Partnered with your child, you stand a better chance of devising an organization scheme and system that makes sense to him or her. If they're involved in the effort, children are better able to understand the organizational logic and maintain an organized room.

Children's rooms are usually small, often shared, and generally lack built-in storage. Begin with clothing: sort it out! Store out-of-season or outgrown clothing elsewhere. Finally, simplify! Remove the extras so the remainder can stay neat and orderly in the available space. For younger children, a toy library is the answer to over-abundant toys. Using a large lidded plastic storage container, large box or even plastic garbage bag, entrust a selection of toys to the "toy library." Store the container in an out-of-the way place for several months. Older kids can utilize higher closet shelves to "store" some of their belongings. Clear plastic shoebox storage containers hold little pieces and identify the contents.

Befitting a child's shorter stature, start organizing from the bottom of the room, and work to the top. Most used toys and belongings should live on lower shelves, in lower drawers, or on the floor. Higher levels are designated for less-frequently-used possessions.

Use a computer printer to make simple graphic labels for young children. Pictures of socks, shirts, dolls or blocks help remind the child where these items belong. Enhance reading skills for older children by using large-type word labels. Slap labels everywhere: inside and outside of drawers, on shelf edges and on the plastic shoebox storage containers that belong there, on boxes and bookcases and filing cubes.

Help children stop the cycle of clutter by building maintenance routines into the family's day. Building a routine of picking up your mess from the day is a habit you can instill in your children that they will carry forever.