The problem: I always hear parents worry that they aren't doing enough enriching and engaging activities with their young child in order to help them to be ready for school and be prepared for the real world. Well, I want you to take that worry off your plate because guess what, everything you do with your young child is already enriching, all you have to do is engage!
The answer: It’s not just the big “Wow!” moments in our children’s lives that are memorable, educational, and full of special bonding moments. Everyday tasks big and small have the opportunity to be meaningful moments to our children - even clean up!
“Seriously, clean up? That’s supposed to be enriching and special time with my kid?” say the skeptical audience members…
Yes, clean up is actually a great example of how something we have to do, that we usually see as drudgery, can be it's own special activity that's fun, educational, and stimulating for children.
When we fight through the things we don't like doing, such as clean up, we feel powerless to them. So change up the rules and expectations. Instead of clean up being an afterthought barely squeezed into your day, in between activities on your overly full plate, plan on clean up being a worthwhile, enjoyable, and enriching activity in and of itself - and let it replace other unrealistic to-do items that you’d honestly like to let go.
For example, the notion that you just have to make a homemade, magical gingerbread house from scratch with your child this year, even though you’ve never even assembled a premade gingerbread kit once in your life? (thank you Great British Baking Show for that inspired yet crazy thought I had for about 30 minutes last week). Yeah, those kinds of pressures that we parents can easily fool ourselves into thinking we need to be doing in order to be doing the best for our children… it’s a slippery slope people.
Anyway, the point is: when you let clean up be its own enriching activity during the day, you actually make room for more family down time.
Think of all the perks that come with this new perspective. Imagine being able to take the fight out of bedtime and skip straight into relaxing, wind down time you'd all rather be having because the end of the day clean up is already done… and don't you wish you were an adult that saw cleaning as a fun, joyful, and worthwhile experience that you wanted to do?
Ways you can make clean up a game:
- Make a ramp with a book to drive cars into their basket
- Put things away by color, "Let's race - I'll pick up the blue blocks, what color are you going to do?"
- Give your child a hand puppet and let it be a sock eating monster (why is it always socks lying around?). Then ham it up a bit, "Oh no!!! The dinosaur i's eating all the socks!"
- Sweeping game: this is my son’s favorite! Sweep as fast as you can while your kid runs from one end of the house to the other, excitedly giggling as they avoid letting the broom "catch" their toes.
- Basktetblocks: for lightweight toys like Mega Blocks, set the bin a few feet away and aim like basketball! “Score!”
With every one of these activities, you have opportunities to teach your kids in simple, easy ways. Basketblocks develops hand eye coordination and large muscle strength. Driving cars up a ramp and letting them fall into a basket encourages scientific thinking and reasoning and demonstrates cause and effect. Pretend play encourages creativity and confidence provides natural opportunities for learning social skills and problem solving.
All of these things matter! This is why so many preschool environments are play based - children are natural learners, we just have to give them the time and opportunities to engage with almost anything and they will thrive.
Lastly, I want to leave you with a key to really making this successful: talk to you kid about this concept of making something we have to do fun before it's actually clean up time. Tell them openly and honestly about the choice they have: clean up has to happen in life, so you can make it fun or you can make it drag. After all, there are no rules that cleaning up can't be fun, worthwhile, and a beautiful piece of life.
