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You know you've got too much kid stuff. Yet try to chuck that one-armed Barbie or dented dump truck, and suddenly your child can't live without it. How do you lose the excess and keep the peace?
- Appeal to their better nature: Explain the concepts of giving and sharing — that a lot of little kids have nothing.
- Enlist their help: Kids will be a lot less upset to see their toys go if they are part of the process. Let them help select what will stay and what will go.
- Look at everything: Use this opportunity to reorganize. Have the kids dump all their toys in a big pile in the middle of the floor and go through everything, piece by piece.
- Use the three-basket approach: Put three plastic laundry baskets in each kid's room. Ask him or her to fill the red basket with broken toys; the blue basket with toys they don't play with anymore and the pink basket with toys they want to keep. Oh yeah, and the pink and blue baskets have to have equal amounts of stuff.
- The fourth basket: If too many toys wind up in the “keeper” basket, try this strategy. Have the child fill a cardboard box with toys he's not playing with right now and store the box in the attic or garage. By summer, he might be ready to part with them — especially if you let him sell them at a garage sale and keep the proceeds to buy one special new toy.
- Create a holding zone: If your child's too little to make a real decision, stash broken or ignored toys and books where she won't find them. If she hasn't missed an item in a month or two, it's fair game for donation or disposal. Just cart it away in a black garbage bag, so she won't see it go.
Once you've culled the toy box, you might even have enough energy left to tackle the kids' closets and drawers!
