The Busy Mom’s Guide to Decluttering and Organizing Toys

Do you ever feel like your kid’s toys seem to multiply overnight? I know I do. Kids get toys everywhere these days so no wonder it feels like the toys are taking over your house. They probably are! Your kids get toys from school, from restaurants, at birthday parties, and for every holiday imaginable. Toys can fill your home pretty quickly and you have about three options for dealing with them. You can let them take over your house completely, you can ban all toys from your house from this day forward or you can find a system that will allow you to easily declutter and organize your children’s toys. Here is the busy mom’s guide to decluttering and organizing toys.

Limit Your Children’s Toys

No matter how much space you have for your children’s toys, you should limit the amount of toys that they have. This doesn’t mean that you have to cut down to 10 toys per child or that you need a complicated toy rotation system. Although you can try those techniques if you want to. This simply means that you have areas set aside for toys and once those areas are filled, some toys have to leave before more can be brought in. If you don’t have a dedicated playroom and your toy storage areas are overflowing you know it is time to enforce your toy limits. If you do have a dedicated playroom and it looks like a tornado went through it 24/7, it is also time to set some toys limits.

Designate a Spot For All Toys

To get started keeping your children’s toys organized, have designated spots for them. We are not lucky enough to have a dedicated playroom in our home (oh how I wish we did). Since we don’t have the luxury of a playroom our children’s toys are stored in the  family room and their bedrooms. In each of those places, we have spots designated for different types of toys. You can keep the spots pretty general, but your kids should know where certain types of toys go.

Buy Good Toy Organization Tools

It is really tough to organize and declutter toys if you don’t have places to put them that makes it easy for your kids to maintain your systems. Check out my list of The Best Tools For Organizing Your Children’s Toys. These tools will really help you get your children’s toys organized without breaking the bank. Your kids will also quickly pick up on how to organize the toys when using these items.

Teach Your Kids To Help Put Toys Away Nightly (When They Are Old Enough)

If you are picking up all the toys for your kids every night after they go to bed. Just stop! You are working way too hard momma! One of the best ways to keep your children’s toys organized is to teach them to help you pick them up. Even if they don’t do a perfect job, it will help you out and they will learn as they go. Model for them and help them when you first get started. Here is the 3 Step Strategy that I have used to teach my kids to pick up their toys since they were toddlers.

Declutter and Sort The Toys Every 3-6 months

The most difficult part of organizing and decluttering your children’s toys is usually the decluttering. The reason this is so difficult is because this is the part that gets overwhelming and is time consuming. Just like decluttering your children’s clothes, you need to declutter their toys fairly often. This is because toys get broken and your kids outgrow them. The more often you declutter the toys, the less overwhelming it becomes. I try to declutter our toys every 3-6 months.

Here is how you can quickly and efficiently declutter the toys in your home.

1. Pick a small area to organize and declutter. This can be a bin, drawer or container.
2. Empty all the contents
3. Sort the toys into these 6 piles: Trash, Donate, Repair, Put Back, Move, Missing Pieces.
4. Continue sorting until the area is complete or your allotted time for sorting is up.
5. When you are done with the sort, put back the items that still belong there. Put all trash in the garbage, put donations in a bag, and set aside toys in a bag that you can actually repair.
6. The last step is to put any items that belong elsewhere in the house back to the place they belong. Then return missing pieces of toys and games to their rightful place.
7. If you cannot locate the other pieces of a toy or game, set them aside in a bag in a safe place. You may find the other parts or you may not. Write down a date in your planner or mark it in your phone about 30 days from now to throw away those pieces if the rest of the toy does not appear.

Make Changes As Necessary

The final key to organizing and decluttering toys is to make changes when necessary. You kids will grow and their toy collection will change. As it does, don’t be afraid to adjust your spaces and the toy organization bins that you use. Most people rearrange their home from time to time, so don’t be afraid to play around with your toy organization and storage systems.