Keeping Your Home Clean With Kids

Cleaning might seem like a chore.  Well, it certainly can be.  Especially if you are trying to balance keeping the home clean and hygienic whilst also balancing childcare and part or even full time working.   It might seem like kids “get in the way” of you being able to get through that never ending to-do list, with all too familiar Parent Guilt creeping in.  Urgh!  We hear your pain, and – in this blog with help from BetterCleans – we want to outline another way to approach the challenge of keeping your home clean with kids – one which gets the kids involved and developing and learning at the same time.  Finding ways to get kids involved with cleaning is a win-win situation for all.  So, we’ll cover plenty of practical and modern cleaning strategies to get your kids involved in cleaning so you can all benefit as a family.   Clean home, engaged kids, what’s not to love? 

Real-Life Play for A Real-Clean Home

Play is such an essential aspect of children’s learning – children learn by playing and exploring their environment.  If you’ve ever watched a toddler bang a saucepan with a spoon and giggle in delight at the sound and their ability to control the noise, you’ve seen play in action – play that does not necessarily require “toys” in the traditional sense.  Providing children with the resources that allows them to explore will support learning, and children will naturally find ways to play with the things in their environment.  So, whilst sorting laundry may feel a world away from fun or play to you, to a small child, its chance to experiment and explore.  You can present a preschooler with a basket of freshly laundered socks and ask them to find the pairs.  Suddenly, there’s a challenge, and a chance for your little one to practice fine motor skills of selecting and placing, using their visual sense and cognitive abilities to look for similarities.  Add in plenty of verbal encouragement and praise from Mom or Dad – and you have a fantastic, fun, learning opportunity for your child.  Meanwhile, you can work alongside them folding other laundry items.   Modelling as you do so and giving your little one to be “just like Dad (or Mom)!”

The skill here is adaptation – take a chore, adapt it to be manageable and accessible for little fingers, offering challenge without undue frustration.  With support and encouragement, you will be able to engage children of a range of ages in helping round the house in such a way that it is real life play, rather than a chore.  

Let’s take a list at some of the many possibilities you can consider offering your child that provide that real-life play action:

• Chop herbs with safety scissors in a bowl whilst you prepare other ingredients for the family meal.
• Give your child a dustpan and brush to sweep a small area of the floor whilst you use the broom to sweep over a larger area.
• Give your child a small water spray and a cloth – they can clean the bottom panes of the window whilst you do the top ones with a window cleaning product.  Sure, you may have to “go over” their handiwork, just to finish up where they have been cleaning, but by getting them involved, they are developing a range of skills and also the value of taking care and responsibility.  
• Children can sort dirty laundry into 2 piles of darks and lights.  
• Kids can easily be shown how to “fluff up” cushions and pillows by dropping them on the floor.  Whilst they do this task, you can be dusting surfaces.  

Tidy Time 

Playrooms are often chock-full of toys, and if your kids are anything like ours, then games and toys can be strewn all over the place by bedtime.  When it’s time to tidy away, or transition to bath or bedtime, aim to get kids involved in developing responsibility and respect for belongings by engaging them in the tidy-up process.  Tidy time does not need to be a chore if you consider it to be a chance to learn and develop.  For example, using a timer can bring an element of challenge to the task:   “who can pick up the most blocks before the time runs out?”, or “I wonder if we can get all the toys packed away before the song finishes?”.    You can also ask kids to use their sort and classify skills to put all the blue bricks away, whilst you tidy the red pieces.  

Developing a Sense of Order

Some kids will also benefit from a technique to keep a tidy and ordered play space that comes from the world of Montessori education.  Dr. Maria Montessori established her now world-famous Montessori method to child development and learning in the early 20th Century. Montessori believed that fostering imagination through play was best achieved by offering children a simple and natural environment to allow children to learn things through exploration.  Having a play rug that provides a clear boundary of the area on which a child is playing with a certain toy can help to contain the mess and keep things that are a little bit simpler.  So, with Lego blocks for example, the child is encouraged to keep the blocks on the rug.  They can move them and spread them out as much as they like on the rug – but the intention is to limit the spread across the room, where pieces may then be lost or stepped upon.  

The Montessori method also involves encouragement for children to return a toy to its proper storage place when they have finished playing with it, before getting something else out.  Think of the motto: “A place for everything, and everything in its place”.   This approach helps to develop a discipline of mind and a sense of order and structure that may well benefit your child throughout life.  You can support your child with this by asking them – “where does this toy go now that you have finished with it?” to encourage them to develop responsibility and respect for toys, and to help maintain a tidy and safe play space.  

Mind Your Language

Clean Language can help with a clean home!  By this, we mean, tidy up your talk of home tasks, so that you don’t talk about tasks as negative and burdensome chores that you are forcing your child to endure.  Instead, clear away the negativity and replace your talk with a positive focus.  You want to avoid describing activities as tasks you both have to do before you can play – instead – think of them as fun chances to learn or explore:  the word “challenge” is often useful for reframing a task and can really help children with motivation to lend-a-hand.  So instead of “we have to do this cleaning up before we can play”, try “let’s see if we can find a way to get all of these bits of paper on the floor into the bin without dropping any – what tools do we need to help us with this challenge?”  You can also bring a sense of encouragement and celebration into your talk with your chid as you clean and tidy the home together, so it is clear to your child that you and they are doing something positive together. 

So, hopefully you’ve picked up on some helpful tips on how to keep your home clean with kids.  Sure, a clean home whilst you have kids can feel a bit like shovelling snow in a blizzard at times.  But, with everyone on board, you can help your kids to recognise that everyone in the family has a role to play in keeping your home tidy and clean.