Clutter in the nursery is common. Toys are scattered everywhere, paints and crafts are scattered on the table, and clothes are piled up in a heap. However, this chaos hardly bothers children. Therefore, disorder often becomes the cause of quarrels and power struggles between parents and children.
The main problem is that the views of parents and children about how a neat children's room should look like are very different.
First you need to teach your child to clean. You need to show your kids how to keep order and explain to them why cleaning is important.
How much a child can do on their own depends on their age and development. But even very young children can already help with cleaning. Young children have fun participating in everyday tasks. This helps to increase their self-confidence.
To get your toddler involved in cleaning, the following guidelines may be helpful:
- For self-cleaning, it is necessary to equip the nursery in such a way that the items are at a level accessible to the child, with conveniently stackable drawers,
- sort the toys so that the child knows where what lies, - for playing with small toys, it is better to lay a cloth on the floor, so that later it will be more convenient to collect everything, - do not set too high demands on cleaning, this can lead to overload and hatred of the child for cleaning, - children need time to finish their game, so children need to be advised that in 10-15 minutes it will be time to clean up, - approach the cleaning process in a playful way. For example, cars are driven into the garage, and the dolls are put to bed, - give your child small assignments, for example, collecting stuffed toys in a box, - do not forget to praise the child and be happy about the neat room, - disassemble and discard broken and old toys together with your child, do not create an excess of toys, - do not clean for your child, if you blame him for the mess, and then clean yourself, the child will understand that cleaning is not his responsibility,
- do not help to look for things, if the child needs some thing, he must find it himself, - establish certain rules, for example, put pencils in a glass, and put dirty clothes in a laundry basket, -be a role model, if you maintain order in the apartment, the child will follow your example.
At the age of 5-6, most children already know what cleaning is. But children do not like to simply follow instructions. The child should be more encouraged to have his own ideas about how to fold his things. For younger students, cleaning is a matter of agreements. How often do you clean? Where does the substance belong? What is a cleaned room? Discuss more details with your child.
And if you don't agree at all? First, it's worth checking ourselves: are we too picky about order? If in doubt, be more tolerant. It is very important for the development of the child that he learns how to independently regulate the cleaning process as early as possible. This serves an educational purpose: so that the child becomes a freely developing independent personality, and does not waste energy on fulfilling orders set from the outside. Parents should pull themselves together and let the child do the cleaning themselves. Something like this: "We agreed that you will clean up today." “I almost stepped on the thing you left on the floor. Pick it up before it breaks."
In adolescence, most of the children have a pogrom in the room. Shouting, hitting, or grumbling is pointless. Parenting experts advise to be patient when expensive CDs are lying on the floor, the bed is not made, and the closet is unsightly packed with things. Teenagers try themselves as a new person who has dissociated themselves from their parents. Meanwhile, parents should only hope that the previous upbringing did not pass without leaving a trace and insist only on the minimum requirements for cleaning. These requirements can be something like this:
-the general rules apply in the living room, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, it must be neat there so that everyone is comfortable, -in the children's room there should be a free passage to the window so that it can be ventilated, -the disorder should not harm the child's studies, for example, the search for school notebooks.
Thus, cleaning in each age group of children has some differences. However, the argument that can be used for a child of any age is the same: cleaning is needed not because it is beautiful, but because it is very convenient to find your things quickly.
