[OnAMission]

If I find I am having to help too much, then our rule is that “If Mom has to help you clean up, then all the toys Mom cleans up are going away for awhile (weeks to months) because part of the responsibility of owning things is taking care of them and putting them away when you are done.” So we severely limit the number of things that are out. For my boys at times (especially the 4-6 ages), they have had as few as five toys out. Because that’s all they could easily clean up themselves I would do the same for chairs. “I will help you move them back, but that means losing the privilege of using them for forts or whatever else because part of the responsibility of using something is putting it back”

Little kids get overwhelmed so easily, especially by a large mess. Even *I* get overwhelmed by a large mess when I look at the play room sometimes. So if I look at it and feel overwhelmed, then I definitely offer to pitch in and while we clean up or after we clean up, we discuss how to clean when it is too much and how to avoid the big mess in the future: choose one set of toys to clean up at a time; have access to fewer toys at once; it’s more fun to play in an open space; not taking out more than we can tidy ourselves; etc

Our family of 6 lives in 1450 sq ft. So it can easily get to be messy all over our whole house. I regularly get rid of extra things, and even now, we probably have at least one third too many toys.