Laundry organisation - a kid friendly system
I know all of us parents are looking to catch a break. Army life or not, we’re all looking for ways to foster independence in our children. Pinterest boards, websites and Facebook feeds are bombarding us daily with advertising for self-help books and online parenting courses, all of which promise to transform our child within 14 days, all for the low price of $29.99.
Friends, I make no such promises. After reading this post you’re not going to wake up to your six year old bringing you an Espresso and asking you what they can do to make your day more joyful, but you just might have slightly less harried mornings - and that to me, is bliss!
I’ve struggled for years (since having a second child to be honest) to keep on top of the ever-growing pile of laundry my family (now five strong!) creates. We have strategically placed dirty laundry hampers in multiple rooms of our home including: bedrooms, bathrooms and laundry, so that putting dirty clothes and linens where they belong is easy. I dutifully stick to the ‘one load a day’ rule to ensure that we all have clean clothes and bedding when we need it. I even remember to switch out the wet clothes into the dryer routinely. But what I am absolutely useless at is remembering/getting around to sorting, folding and packing away clean, dry washing. I find it such a ridiculous bore of a chore. We all have that one that we hate, right? For me, sorting laundry is right up there with cleaning toilets. There are so many more pressing and exciting things to draw my attention during the day. Inevitably, that daily load of laundry finds its way to an armchair or the end of my dining table until there’s nothing left but a picked over, skeleton of a pile of clothes, a shadow of its former self, by the end of the week. In my home, this pile which grows by the day is affectionately referred to as ‘mount washmore’. It's become somewhat of a permanent fixture in our home - until recently that is.
Let me share with you the laundry sorting system we have recently put in place in our home. It gets our kids (even the really little ones!) involved in the daily chores of family life and creates a rather more streamlined process for getting clean laundry from dryer to drawers.
Five steps to Laundry Sorting for kids:
Step 1.) Get dirty laundry in the right place.
I touched on this one already: placing laundry hampers in multiple, easily accessible places around the house has enabled all three of our little ones (aged six, three and 15 months) to put their dirty laundry in the correct place and the oldest two can tackle that job without assistance. We’ve noticed so far in our parenting journey that young children are fiercely logical in their thinking. If we place things in a logical position, relative to where it would be used most - our kids will more often than not, see it, remember it’s purpose and use it (i’ll talk more about this later!).
Step 2.) folding and sorting.
Image: black kitchen trolley
Here’s the kicker, the item that has revolutionised my laundry game: the humble kitchen trolley. We have two of these babies, purchased years ago from a local hardware store for a very reasonable price. They have to be one of my most favourite, versatile home objects. Ours have had one million and one uses in their short lives, but right now, one serves as our laundry sorting station. We have a large area rug in our kids’ playroom and as soon as a load of the kids clothes/towels/sheets comes out of the dryer it gets upended on the floor and we set about sorting it together. You’d think kids would hate this right? Mine view it as the ultimate challenge, as the test of coordination to end all others. They LOVE learning to fold differently sized items and then they immediately file it on their shelf of the kitchen trolley. I grabbed out my trusty label maker and allocated each of my children, one shelf of the trolley (tallest for the eldest). They then help me fold their clothes etc. and fill up their shelves. Even my 15 month old enjoys this task and helps by placing the items I hand him onto his shelf of the trolley. I also have a stash of kids coat hangers with me so that hanging items can be quickly popped on a hanger and hung from the handles of the trolley. My two eldest then roll the trolley down to their room (which they love!, they have fun rolling it through the house and feel independent and capable at the same time: win-win!). They then work together to get everything put away in it’s place with the help of a handy armchair they can stand on to reach taller shelves/hanging space. As a little reward for their hard work, I let them play with the trolley for a while afterwards; they love turning it into a grocery trolley, a doll pram, an ice cream stand or a meal cart.
Step 4.) storage system.
Coming back now to the logical brains of young children. Hubby and I noticed very early in our parenting journey that our children’s brains operated in an extremely linear, logical way; they were constantly drawing connections between two things and making choices based on what seemed the most logical option to them, as opposed to what made the most sense for hubby and I organisationally. For example, I used to store kids cups/plates/bowls in an easy reach spot for when I unloaded the dishwasher, until my oldest requested that I move them to the lowest draw for her. The lowest draw certainly isn’t what is most logical for me, but I quickly realised that putting them in the place that made the most sense for her gave her the freedom to fetch her own dishes at mealtime and in turn, allowed her to help with chores like setting the table and unloading the dishwasher. Same goes for snacks in the pantry: my functional, organisational brain wants to keep snack foods in the containers that look prettiest and on the shelf where they blend best with the size, colour and food type of my other pantry items; but putting them on a low, easy reach shelf at my kids’ eyeline makes the most sense for them.
Translating this to laundry: each child has a pyjama and underwear drawer, a pants/shorts drawer and then a hanging section for shirts/dress clothes with the tallest storage places always going to the eldest. They can easily reach each drawer and know where to file their clothes (this doesn’t mean they always do - they’re kids after all, but they know where everything is kept and have been able to choose their own outfits independently since they were about two). We also keep towels of all types in the most logical places, no it’s not as pretty as if we had a fully stocked linen cupboard of colour coordinated pieces, but it works! Hand towels are kept under the children’s bathroom sink so they need never chase me down for one (one of my kids in particular has a penchant for drying their hands on the run and then depositing the towel in the most obscure place imaginable so that the next person to use the bathroom has to holler to me for a towel). And bath towels are kept in my bottom dresser drawer so that hubby and I can grab one with ease, whether the kids are showering in our bathroom or theirs.
Finally, Step 5.) Prepare for your mornings!
Just being brutally honest here, mornings in my home are an absolute battlefield. There are: the sleep deprived, the over-sleeper, the ‘I slept through my alarm’, the early bird and the ‘I’m too hungry to sleep’ members in my family. The only thing that saves my sanity is my evening before preparations on weeknights (I have a little breather on the weekend). I pack lunch boxes (even for my non school-attenders), reset the house as much as possible and I lay out clothes for each of us for the next day. I have one picky dresser who started fighting me on every outfit at a very young age, so the easy solution is making the choices accessible and asking my oldest two to pick out their clothes for the next day before they go to sleep and this *almost* always eliminates the crazed scavenge for a pair of matching socks at two minutes to bell time!
Do you have a system that works brilliantly for you? Let me know in the comments below.
Right…now we’ve got the kids sorted, I need to repurpose our other kitchen trolley for hubby’s and my clothes and linen so we can say goodbye to good old mt. washmore for good ;)
