As someone who actually gets a sweat on when looking around my house at the end of the weekend, I felt an enormous sense of relief. Looking at Instagram, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone else lives in immaculate homes where children tidy up their beautiful, wooden toys at the end of each day, leaving a relaxing space for the adults to enjoy their evening.
A quick scan of my house is more likely to reveal laundry piles, outgrown shoes lurking unloved near the door (waiting for someone to take them to the charity shop), miscellaneous blocks strewn across the floor and paper everywhere. So much paper.
The reality is that young children’s play is often not tidy! And nor should it be. We think it’s time to get real about what playing at home looks like.
Before having children many of us might have thought that we could create a neat area in one section of a room, dedicated to a selection of carefully chosen playthings. And then you have children and realise that this just isn’t how it works. For a while you persist. Moving the plastic food back to the kitchen (or if you are me, making the toy kitchen look exactly like a kitchen again).
You spend hours collecting teddies from under the sofa and trying to ‘helpfully’ suggest that the baby game would be best played near the baby furniture. And then you realise that it is indeed pointless. We’re not saying ANY sort of tidying is pointless, but there is a definite benefit to accepting that mess and children come as one package.
“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” American comedian Phyllis Diller
And it is also helpful to know that it is completely normal for children to play in ways that we as adults might not appreciate, i.e., messily. Here’s why it won’t just be parents who are celebrating Marie Kondo’s new stance. Our children will also be breathing a sigh of relief. And not just because this means they don’t have to tidy up at the end of a day (which for older children can build skills such as teamwork and taking responsibility).
Their play needs time to grow
Sometimes your toddler needs to come back to something they’ve been playing with over time. They have an idea and have spent ages building a house, train track or farm, for example, and if you put it away, they lose all that thinking and have to start again. Can you imagine how annoying this would be for us as adults?!
Brains learn by doing
Exploring your ideas when you’re little involves moving things, getting things out, looking at things and combining things in different ways. This is all great thinking, but not always tidy!
We can start to view mess differently
Accepting that there might be things left out but seeing this as productive can help. Your house might not be Instagrammable, but your toddler is learning. Yes, there might be a load of plastic balls in the sink but the joy and development that probably came from watching them float is enormous.
Everyone has their own threshold for comfortable chaos
In our house the chaos builds and builds until I suddenly have my own meltdown and we all work to put things back together again (sort of, minus the shoes that still need taking to the charity shop).
My threshold is different to my husband’s threshold. Your threshold will be different to your friends’. Figuring out what this is and then accepting your decision and not comparing yourself to others is helpful. It is also useful when thinking about this to consider your priorities. Is collecting up every soft toy as important as sitting down and watching television for half an hour? Sometimes a tidy house doesn’t feel quite as crucial as having a bit of a rest.
If you can, find a place where you are happy for there to be some productive mess – this might be a corner of a room, or somewhere that you don’t need to look at or tidy every day!
And if you’re not able to give yourself permission to leave the mess, then at least remember that even organisation queen Marie Kondo has admitted that keeping a tidy house with children is a step too far.
And who are we to argue with that?!