Creative Child December 2019 | Page 43

With the holiday train sure to unload more clutter, one of the best gifts just might be empowering your child to get organized. Research shows that people with tidier homes sleep better, are healthier, and have better focus. And as Marie Kondo cites as the motivation for her new children’s book, Kiki & Jax: The Life-Changing Magic of Friendship, “When children learn how to tidy, they realize what’s important to them.” Teaching your child to clean can be the gift that keeps on giving. Here are some helpful tips and ways to empower your child to tidy up. Assign a place for everything. As parents, we need to empower our children to clean. And they can’t really clean if they don’t know where things belong. So it’s important for parents to do the underlying work and create those bins and boxes. It may even help to create boxes within boxes. And if they are too young to read, you can even label the boxes with pictures. By assigning a place for their things and equipping them with the tools to clean, they’ll feel empowered to clean even when mom or dad isn’t around to provide instructions. 42