Welcome back to the Simplicity Parenting podcast with me, Kim Jon-Pain. And as promised, this week, again, we have Laura Carlin with us. Welcome Laura.
Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's our pleasure.
Laura is the author, the co-author of Clutter-Free Parenting, making space in your home for the magic of childhood and the joy of parenthood. Probably most of us tuned in last episode to listen to that bigger picture, beautiful introduction of clutter-free homes. This time, we're going to look a little bit more about the practicalities and how to clear clutter.
But one of the things that I was struck by, Laura, just in us chatting before we began the recording today, was you were talking about how clearing clutter can result in, you described as a ripple effect, like in terms of how you feel inwardly, the energy you have. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. So the wonderful thing about clearing clutter is that even removing one thing from your home that's not useful or loved or clearing out one drawer can shift an entire pattern.
So my sister talks about this in the book. It's an example from her own life. It was always difficult for her to get out the door in the morning to get to work on time and get her three-year-old to school.
And she realized she'd always get hung up on making the lunch. And part of the reason was, is the Tupperware drawer was really cluttered. And she decided to organize that one drawer.
And she got rid of everything except the three things that she used to make her son's lunch. And that one action, clearing that one drawer, just changed the entire dynamic in the morning. She was more relaxed.
She said she took more time making the lunch, which resulted in her making a better lunch for Tobin. When she dropped him off at school, he was in a different place. She showed up at work in a different place.
And that's what tends to happen with clutter. It has that ripple effect to where we may think, oh, this one drawer, this one item isn't really affecting me, when in fact, it could be affecting many areas of our life, like our relationships or our health or our work. And that kind of making, that relates back a little bit to what we talked about last time of just making space.
Because when space is made like that, you know, good things come into it, a feeling of flow. That's true. And for me, the decluttering has, in my own family, has had so much to do with when it does occur, when we declutter and put things to rights and organize, a greater sense of flow comes into the house for, you know, months afterwards.
You just get this feeling of rightfulness, like, okay, things have their place. And, you know, and then, of course, it needs to begin again, a couple of months later, you know, you have to do it again. Which is appropriate, because we're not meant to be in a static environment, because we're always growing and changing.
And that's especially true when we have children who are physically growing and changing so quickly. So there is an element of wanting to recreate our environment to match who we are in each new moment. Yeah, good, good point.
Yeah, great point. And more specifically, you talk about four steps to clearing the clutter, and then you give some really great tips. Let's just have a look at those, about these four steps.
Okay, so the first step is to pick an area. And I suggest starting small, because I think that having an easy win is motivating, and you'll be more prepared for the more challenging areas. So it can even be helpful to create a clutter plan to actually make a checklist where you list the rooms in your home, and then within each room, you list an area.
So let's say you started in your child's bedroom, and you began with their toy shelf. And so the second step would be that you would take everything off the shelf. And the reason we need to do this is because if we don't take everything off the shelf or out of the closet or out of the drawer, we really tend to cheat.
We just rifle through and don't really address each item. And we really want to engage with and address every item in our home. And so then the third step would be that you would clean the shelf, clean the closet, clean the drawer.
And the reason why is once we have this empty, freshly cleaned space, we're going to be much more mindful about what we put back in. And then the final step is determine, is this object loved or useful? And I talked a little bit about that last time, but that's really doing a check-in. So with the useful items, we're asking ourselves questions such as, well, when is the last time I used it? Do I have something else in my house that fulfills the same function? And then for the loved items, we want to observe how we respond to observe our thoughts, our feelings, how our body reacts, because the things that we love are going to make us feel expansive and take a deep breath.
We'll have a positive thought, a positive feeling, and the things that we don't love, the opposite will happen. And that relates a little bit to these three guidelines that you mentioned, Laura, is that things to keep in mind as you're actually clearing out. And you sort of give hints there, really, really practically, you know, it's a very practical sort of three guidelines to keep in mind as you clear.
You know, mine, my eye went right through that. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. So the first very important one is clear first, organize later.
And this is so important because clutter by its nature and inherently it can't be organized. So we will just waste our time and our energy and sometimes our money because we'll be tempted to go out and buy all these containers and organizing dividers and stuff like that. And truly, once we've cleared, you know, often a clutter free drawer requires a little or no organization.
So we really want to do the process first of deciding what are we letting go of and what are we keeping? And then we can put our attention on the organizing part later. And so the second thing to keep in mind is to call like items. So if you're someone who stores the same type of items all throughout your house, you want to bring those items together into the room you're working on.
So, for example, if you're working on your closet where you have most of your clothes, let's say your bedroom closet, and then you also keep clothes in a guest room closet or front hall closet, you would retrieve those clothes and bring them up to your bedroom so you can address all your clothes at once. And kind of in the opposite way, if you're in your child's playroom and there's things that belong in the kitchen, you'd put those items in the kitchen to be dealt with when you get to the kitchen. And then finally, we want to commit to the whole house.
And, you know, ideally, we are we are going to address each and every item in our home. And that's what's going to give us a new level of simplicity in our life is when we've really gone in our, you know, through our home top to bottom, which is not to say that small steps don't make a difference as we talked about. Hmm.
You know, I was also struck by the client that you mentioned, Laura, who was kind of got stuck a little bit on what to do with the stuff once you have it all in the bag and looking for this perfect place. You tell a little bit of a story in the book about that, about this particular mom. Yes.
So sometimes it's hard to for people to let go and we can come up with all kinds of reasons. And for this particular mother, it was because she wanted to find the perfect place to donate the items. And I think it is wonderful to be mindful about where we donate and how we donate.
You know, we want to we want to give in the way that we'd like to receive. So we want to have our items, you know, clean and folded and and and separated into bags and do as much of that as we can, but not to the point where it holds us up, especially if we're feeling super overwhelmed by our homes. Sometimes it's more important just to let go.
And then when we become more masterful at our clutter clearing, we can become, you know, more detailed about how and where we donate. And, you know, you give a one story in the book to us about when James, who's getting to be a big boy now, but when he was little, when he came home and kind of walked in the door and you see things with a new perspective. I'd never really thought of that before, this being away and coming back and seeing things and helping people almost tune into that.
I think that's a great idea. Can you tell us about what James said? It was really rather lovely. Mind you, knowing James, he's prone to these very.
OK, so he is. And actually it happened. I don't know which story you have in mind.
It happened with both James and Matthew, but we went on vacation and we came home and he took one look at his room. He said, Mommy, he goes, you know, we've got to clear out this room. This is, you know, I this this stuff isn't doesn't work for me anymore, because I think at the time he was, I don't know, maybe it was like a shift from third grade to fourth grade or around there where he just realized he had outgrown the stuff that it was in his room.
And then a similar thing happened with Matthew, my younger son, because we had moved from our main home is in Idaho, but we're living in L.A. for work. And so we brought very few things to our rental home in L.A. and he got back to Idaho, which was certainly not a cluttered home by any means, and saw his room and said, I can't live like this. There's too much stuff in here because he had gotten used to living even more simply in Los Angeles.
And that also it drove home a couple of points for me. First of all, there is so much to be gained, perspective to be gained from when we are away from home and then come back with fresh eyes. But also it reminded me that we may think that our kids don't care about the environment, but really more accurately, they may just not yet have experienced the gift of a clutter free environment.
Yeah, and there's this aspect of how to let go as well. And you touch on that briefly in the book, but it's a big theme, isn't it, of really this feeling of being overwhelmed. But then how do we actually let go of this stuff? OK, so I think I might have mentioned this before, which is that how we clear can be as important as what we clear.
And so we want to be compassionate with ourselves as we go about this process and we want to be compassionate with our things. So we want to let go with gratitude and with intention. So Marie Kondo, who's the organizing expert, I'm sure many people have heard about, she says to thank your items out loud.
And I think that's very powerful. You know, you can thank him out loud or just be grateful, silently grateful. And you can appreciate the item for how it serves you.
You can appreciate the person who gave it to you. You could be grateful for the fact that you had the money to purchase all this stuff. But what that does is moving into gratitude instantly shifts us out of any judgments or negative self-talk we might have going on in our heads.
Like, how did I get so much stuff? Why did I waste so much money? Etc. And then the other piece is intention, which is to have the intention, may this serve someone else for their highest and greatest good. And there's something about that combination of gratitude and intention that usually just moves us right out of that overwhelm and just brings a lot of grace and helps you let go.
Hmm. And then you move on through to talking about that sort of segues beautifully into caring for the things, not only that you give away and sending them off with a little blessing in a certain sense, even though I probably it's hard to send a Barbie doll off with a blessing, but it's maybe it's maybe possible. But you talk about caring for the things you keep, placement and the organization of things.
Can you walk us through that? Sure. So the way to care for the things you keep is to find a good home for them, a home within your home. And I talk in the book about thinking of the objects in our home as alive.
And they're alive in two ways because they're molecularly alive. They have their own vibration and energy and they're alive in terms of how we feel about them, our thoughts and and the memories they may trigger. So if we really have that relationship with the items in our home, then it tends to make us care for them in a different way.
And so you want to think about this item and and think about how it wants to live in your home. And usually how it wants to live is in a space that's clean and spacious. And what that also does by finding a clean and spacious home is it makes it it makes us put them away easier.
You know, we really want things to be accessible because if we're going to have these things in our home, which are a trade on our time and energy, we want to be using them. So we want to make it easy to take out and then even more importantly, easy to pick up and put away. Very, very much so.
And you go you go into that a little bit, a bit further when you you talk about, you know, when you avoid putting things away. Is that is that mainly due to just kind of not knowing where to put it down? Have you come across that a lot with the people you work with, this avoidance of putting things away? Because I have two daughters, Laura, as you know, they're 17 and 19 years old. And even though sometimes, you know, we create places to put things away, things can still be just left on the floor.
What I find is it's then easier to make the recorrection to say, hey, do you mind putting that in the and there is a the, you can put it in place. For me, it cuts out a lot of the nagging. It's a much quicker way, a shorthand way and a kind of above all, it's a no fuss way of engaging with kids to help them put things away because they know where to put it.
Did that come up? Does that come up for you very much? Absolutely. Because usually when we avoid any kind of task and definitely putting things away, it's because we don't know what the next step is or there's something about the next step that that we want to avoid. So, you know, if you I don't know why this is coming to mind, but it's probably because it's one of my weaknesses, passwords, digital passwords.
But if I have to fill out an online form for school and I and I have that little bit of anxiety, gosh, I don't know what the password is. I'm going to delay that task. And so the same things happens in our home.
Like if we don't know what the next step is, like where does this item belong? Or if there's something that where it belongs that causes anxiety, like, oh, gosh, I have to face the closet where I might open the door and things might topple down on top of me. That is going to make us avoid avoid putting things away. Yeah.
Yeah. And then just as we round off this this podcast episode today, Laurie, you talk about you give some really great tips for clearing children's clutter. And then what I love is then managing it, you know, staying on top of it all.
Can you walk through those those tips, because they're just so practical and grounding. You know, I can tell, you know, you've been doing this for years. This is the voice of the pro here, for sure.
Yeah, it's been a long time. So so, yes, because our goal is ultimately, you know, we don't just want to become an expert clutter clearers. We also want to reduce this cycle of, you know, accumulating and and getting rid of stuff.
So there's some keys to preventing clutter from accumulating in the first place. And so the first one is to really monitor what comes in, to really start thinking outside your home, to make sure, you know, making choices outside your home. So before you purchase something, really asking, is this loved? Is this useful? You know, do I really need it? So maybe you decide you're going to borrow a book from the library instead of purchasing one, or your child receives the bag of party favors and you keep one and donate the rest, or you get in the habit of putting the mail in the recycle bin before you even get in your front door.
And so another key then is to plan ahead, because our children are growing and changing so quickly that if we don't have a plan for those outgrown items, then that's when we're going to get cluttered. And that ties back into what we were saying before. If we don't know what the next step is, that's when the clutter starts to accumulate.
So if you're at the changing table and you get, you know, get the onesie on your child and realize it doesn't fit and, you know, that's already a feat in itself, getting an infant dressed and then you don't have a plan for that outgrown onesie, it's going to go back in the laundry, even though it's clean, or back in the drawer. So you want to have already thought ahead, OK, I'm going to have another baby, so I'm going to have a plastic bin and a labeled plastic bin ready for this item, or I know I'm going to be donating or giving it to a friend. And so you have a bag ready to put the outgrown items in.
So you really want to think ahead. And then another key is to involve our children. And Kim, you were really the inspiration for this, is to involve our children very early on in the process of caring for their things, you know, pretty much as soon as they're able to.
And I think that what we can be mindful about in our home is, again, making it easy for them, really empowering them. As you said, better that we don't have to say much. But when there's a stool, you know, which allows them to put something away or there's an open toy bin that's easy for them to reach or they have a hook for their jacket that's right at their level, you know, all of these things empower our child to help out.
You know, and one thing, Laura, just a final thought here, a final word is, is this is this whole dynamic around sentimental items? You know, when I'm giving talks on simplicity, parenting related themes and we're doing workshops, inevitably this comes up is parents will say to me, I get it about the clutter. I just would love to do this. But my child would go crazy.
He's attached to everything, every last thing that is under his bed. And there are many. Everything he would tell me is special and he's sentimentally attached to.
Can you can you help? Can you help this this parent out? OK, so a lot of that, a lot of different directions to go with that. So some of it depends on your child's age. But one thing that can really help, and it's very simple, is taking a picture.
Of the item, and I know that sounds too good to be true, but for some reason, when kids have a picture of the item, they are much more willing to let the item go. And part of it also is where where they are developmentally, which, Kim, as you know, in the book, I used your guidelines for discipline in terms of guidelines for parents as to how and when to involve children in clutter clearing. So, of course, young children are going to love everything, especially if you bring it to their attention.
But as you know and I know, most of the time when we clear the things, they don't miss any of it. You know, they can even have the feeling that they're left with more. Yeah.
Yeah, can you tell me a little more about that, Laura, you know, in terms of of these three, well, developmental phases, because and perhaps just we can we can segue into this in our final section, but there are these three phases you mentioned, which we can unpack a little bit more later on. Why does that help? So, so there, you know, as I as I said, I base this on your work in the sole discipline, the governor and the gardener and the guide phase, I realized, gosh, this just works perfectly well for when and how to involve our children in clutter clearing. So, again, two parts of the process when we're choosing what to keep and what to let go of, that's that's our domain.
And then we involve them at the developmentally appropriate time when it comes for caring for the things that can happen at any phase. So when children are very young, we are the governor, we're in charge. And what happens is is when they are given that responsibility, then it becomes overwhelming for them.
You know, they're really not in a place to decide. And it becomes all important to all of a sudden the stuff becomes very important. You know, gosh, well, should I keep this? Should I not? It's too much for a young child.
And then as they get older, around that eight, nine, 10, 11, we can we're going to want their input, but we still have final say. And then in the teenage years, we want to be handing that off, but guiding them in the process. Beautifully put.
You know, when when I when you first mentioned that to me, Laura, when you were writing the book, I was just thrilled that this governor, gardener, guide, the young child, the teenager, the teenager could frame up how to declutter. I just thought that was such a great practical use to those developmental stages. So I guess on that note, we'll round off the podcast for today.
Boy, that was that was packed full. I'm so glad you know your stuff so well, Laura, because, you know, in order to nutshell it like that, to distill it right the way down, really, really means you've got to know your stuff. Well, I love talking about it.
I'm passionate about it. Yeah, yeah. I'm so glad.
So we'll we'll round off there for today. And don't forget to tune in next time for the for the season finale of Clutter Free Parenting. Thanks, Laura.
Thank you.
