Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I wanted to mention a very simple little topic, really, and one that might seem a bit obvious, so apologies if it does ahead of time, and that's about helping kids clean up. This is for, I guess it's all ages really, but it's particularly for younger children, and also, I don't know, through to about 9, 10, 11 year olds, and I think it applies a little bit to older kids as well.
I got a little bit of a tip here, and it's that the cleanup for stuff actually begins in the setup. Now, what I mean by that is that, just going back one step, if you've got a pretty well-organized toy like tubs or baskets or project baskets where, you know, a certain amount like the beading stuff gets in that, the jewelry is in that basket, for little children, like the blankets are in that basket, and so on and so on. That's the first thing, to be relatively well-organized, so that you've got your kids have got their stuff in various containers.
I'm a big fan of that, actually, because it helps a child feel, my world is organized. That's another subject, but it's a big one about having a child feel safe in this world. All right, now, when kids are embarking on a project, or they're embarking on play, the cleanup, like nightmare, can be helped by having those baskets or tubs or whatever they are, bags, and actually saying, limiting and saying to a child, well, if you're going to play dress-ups, you know, for a young child, if you're going to play dress-ups, you can have two tubs out, two big baskets out today, because we had a very good cleanup yesterday.
So, I think we can have a little bit more out. We can. We had good fold-ups, we folded up, and okay, yeah, we can have the blanket basket out too, if you want to build a little cubby house, a little house, that's fine.
But we're going to have to see how all that goes, because how much we get out is how much we can put back. And it's sort of as simple as that. And it's calibrating the get-outs with the put-aways and being very explicit with children about it.
And they might not like it. I get it. They might not like it.
But if an 11-year-old, for example, left project stuff all over the kitchen table, then the next time they want to do a project, you're going to limit the amount of stuff, because clearly it went beyond their ability to pack it up. Now, there was a, this is what a, I think it was a Soviet, way back, educational theorist, Leon Vygotsky, called ZPD, Zone of Proximal Development. And his whole theory was that development has to be, as the name suggests, proximal.
So if it's, if a child, if it's too hard, then they're going to push back, you know, against cleaning up, because it's outside their zone of proximal development. If they don't have enough play equipment out, they're going to get bored, because they possibly could go a little bit further. It's a little bit like the flow principle, like having a child be in flow.
This is a University of Chicago professor called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Try spelling that one, look it up. It starts with a C, by the way, Csikszentmihalyi.
But that's a flow principle. And it has some overlaps with this proximal development thing or growth edge thing it's called these days. And I think there is such a thing as a cleanup edge, as well as a growth edge.
The growth edge goes into how much a child can clean up. Therefore, it's all got to do with therefore governing and curating how much they get out. And if they get stuff out, and with just a normal amount of help from you, they can put it back, then keep them at that for a wee while until they get comfortable with that.
And they know just what to do. And then they can get a little bit more out and see how that goes. One of the ways to judge it is how much you have to personally get involved in the tidy up.
If you find yourself doing like 80% of the tidy up, you want to be able to flip that script and be able to help 20%. Now the journey there, the way you get to helping 20%, and the child does 80%, the way you get there is to start dialing back the amount of stuff that comes out in the first place. And you can do that more easily, if things are organized in categories, if they're organized in tubs and baskets, because you can just simply say, Oh, no, no, the second blanket basket can't come out today, love, we need to be able to do all the fold ups with just one blanket basket and the silks.
That's what we're getting out today. Because that was very, very hard yesterday, wasn't it? It was very hard with all that tidy up, it took so long, and we just had too much, we had too much out. The, the, it's, kids don't like it, always, but they get it, right? Because it's, it's very manifest, it's not philosophical.
It's that there was big trouble yesterday, or recently with getting all this stuff out. So, you know, and getting it all back in, so we're going to dial it back. And I think overall, when a child can self-manage, and put their things back, and with some little bit of help, 20% help, maybe round about that, I think is optimal.
They have a feeling of, of agency, of, of competence. And that's, that's a really big payoff for this. I mean, the, there is one big advantage is, is that we don't have these nightmarish cleanup scenes, where a child is laying on in the middle of this unbelievable mess, just laying and say, I can't.
And you get that, that noise, you know, and they've, and you say, well, you got it all out. And fact is, they did, it's true. But we should have been there, we can be there with how much they get out.
And if they get less stuff out, and they can pack it up 70, 80%, it's all them, then there's this feeling of, you know what, I'm, I'm competent. And that feeling of I am competent, is, is what children need to develop that the frontal lobes that that, that the thinking brain, the executive brain. And this is sort of my last point about this, but it's the sort of deeper point is, when kids can pack up all by their big selves, when they can pack up like this, and they can do this over and over each day, they can manage that, and there's this feeling of competence, that will myelinate and develop the thinking brain, the executive brain, the brain that will help them with their academic learning.
Because you think about it, if they're, if they're 16 years old now, or, or 24 years old, and they're in grad school, or whatever, and they've got to organize a whole big research project as in grad school, or even dial it back to, you know, high school. And they've got to know how much research to do how much to stuff to get out. Because I know this from my own grad school experience, you can go down a research rabbit hole, and have so much research now, particularly, you know, with Google Scholar, and all these various search engines now.
And it's just like getting out too many toys. Come to write your prod, you come to write your dissertation, and it's like, oh, my goodness, there is just way too much stuff. Now dial it all the way back to a four or five year old.
And there you've got it. Okay, I sure hope that was that was helpful. Bye bye for now.
