How to Teach Your Toddler to Clean Up

When you have toddlers in your home, a clean house is not a destination-it's an ongoing journey. Your house probably won't be really clean until the kids move out, but in the meantime, you can get your young children to help out. If you do all the straightening up, you're not doing your children (or yourself) any favors. Picking up after themselves is a skill that they'll need to have as they begin preschool, playdates, and other social activities. Here are a few tips for teaching your toddler to tidy up:

1. Start young. If your child is walking, then he or she is old enough to start learning to put the toys away when playtime is over. Talk the child through it, e.g., "Can you put that book on this shelf?" Demonstrate how it's done as well. You'll have to do the bulk of the cleaning up for a while (unless you're willing to devote a few hours to the endeavor), but don't do it all.
   
   
2. Use musical cues. At many preschools and day care centers, the instructors sing a song during clean-up time. After a couple of weeks, the children associate the song with cleaning up, and will react like Pavlov's dogs, starting to put things away as soon as they hear the song. If you don't know a clean-up song, make one up-the simpler the better. A favorite is "It's time to put the toys away, toys away, toys away," to the tune of "Did You Ever See a Lassie?"
   
   
3. Have containers for everything. Sometime between 12 and 18 months of age, most kids go through a phase where they learn to put little things into bigger things-and they think it's a lot of fun. Take advantage of this developmental step by having special containers in which to put the toys. Your kids will get a kick out of putting all the blocks into a box and tossing all the Little People into a plastic tub. (Tip: When they're done, grab the container and put it away, or they will likely dump it right out again.) Also, try to keep similar toys together-all the animals in one container, all the dishes in another-or the next day you'll find yourself frantically digging through 10 tubs while your child wails for her favorite plastic teacup.
   
   
4. Make it a habit. Sometimes you'll be tempted to just put the toys away yourself, especially if bedtime or some other important deadline is approaching. Try to make these times as rare as possible though, because if your child realizes that dawdling means that you'll do all the work-well, you know how that will go. Along those same lines...
   
   
5. Don't beg, plead, or cajole. This will turn every clean-up session into a battle, and you don't want to argue with your toddler once or twice a day (not about this, anyway). Tell them to clean up, and expect them to do so (of course, continue to help younger children). For older toddlers who are tough cases, you can let them know that any toy not put away will be removed for the next day.
   
   
6. Praise the effort. Once everything (or almost everything) is put away, don't forget to wrap things up with a "Good job!" or a high-five. Wouldn't work be a lot more fun if we all got a high-five each time we finished a report?

Just like anything else, stay consistent and make it fun and one day you'll find yourself with a house that's almost 50% clean.