Toys, toys everywhere!!! Help!

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Forum -> Parenting our children

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amother

Sun, Aug 04 2019, 3:19 pm

My kids are b”h great at entertaining themselves for hours, now that it’s summer break it’s very helpful. BUT their games always include multiple random pieces from many diff containers, and they make a huge MESS. And they have such a hard time cleaning up. Drives me bananas! Playing with one or two buckets never worked bec they don’t play with anything in the typical manner. I.e. they’ll create scenes / backgrounds / roller coasters or camping sites out of totally random stuff.
I bribe, I threat, I give jobs, I leave it for the cleaning lady... arggghh nothing works. I’m tempted to throw out 3 quarters but I do love how busy their toys keep them & don’t want to stop that. Please advise!

amother

Turquoise

Sun, Aug 04 2019, 3:22 pm

I allow everything to be dumped into one giant messy toy box. Out of sight, out of mind. When it comes to them playing with the toys again, they have to sort the toys first in order to play with them, but that is their problem.

amother

Seagreen

Sun, Aug 04 2019, 3:26 pm

As long as the mess is contained in the playroom, I don't care. We clean together once a week for shabbos. If we all work together, it doesn't take that long.

thunderstorm

Sun, Aug 04 2019, 3:47 pm

I find the kids get too overwhelmed when there are so many categories . So if you are allowing a combo of LEGO, playmobil, Clics etc, you can say, we will do step number one. We only have to put away all the clics. Once that’s done , work on the next category. If you assist them they will be more eager to do it. That’s been my experience.

amother

Azure

Sun, Aug 04 2019, 4:49 pm

What’s your space like? Can you keep fewer toys in the main play area and store the rest of them somewhere else? If your kids like using a few pieces from each toy, maybe in your case it would be helpful to keep a small assortment of each toy accessible and the rest somewhere else. The kids can either go to to other less convenient area to get more toys if they need, or you can make a rule that they need to ask you before taking out toys from the other area.

The other option is keeping the full set of a few of the toys out at a time and storing the rest somewhere else and then rotate. But the first may work better for you based on how your kids play.

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