Parent Shares Their Top Tips For Keeping Your Home Organized With Kids, & We Think It's Smart

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For many of us, true home organization — especially with young kids in the house — remains elusive. Random shoes pop up all over the house like mushrooms in the grass after a spring rain. Overstuffed drawers belch, full of last season's sweaters, single socks, and hand puppets for good measure. And who knows how the handheld can opener ended up in the bathroom? However, at least one savvy home organizer, TikTok's @homely.store1, has developed a kid-friendly home storage system that stops those random pairs of shoes in their tracks. 

They employ four principles that keep their home's routines intact: Keep a shoe cabinet by the door, use baskets around the house to create clutter "drop zones," tap multi-functional furniture to expand storage space, and take advantage of under-the-bed and under-couch storage areas.

These organizational methods work on their own and synergistically. Take the trendy multifunctional furniture items, like an ottoman or a Songmics Storage Basket With Lid. These are pieces that stash items like extra afghans or family board games. Empty ones could even be used similarly to how the TikToker uses baskets around the house. Meanwhile, they're also spots to sit, rest your feet, or show off coffee table books. Items like these can be positioned all over the house and given an organizational job before they're put in place. Note, you may want to ask yourself if the system will be simple enough for your kids to use without thinking about things too much. If it is, this ensures your methods will be readily adopted by all your family members.

In the entryway of the TikTok organization pro's home, there are a couple of noticeable items: a chest-of-drawers-style shoe cabinet and baskets hanging on the wall. The placement of the shoe cabinet encourages kids to take off their shoes immediately upon arriving home. It also hides shoe clutter. No one has to think about what to do with their shoes — there's a system already in place for their storage.

@homely.store1

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♬ original sound – Homely.store1

The baskets are stylish storage options for items like baseball caps. The TikToker actually keeps baskets all over the house to hide items and make it easier to carry disparate items back to their assigned places. Here's a practical way you might implement the TikToker's basket system: Keep baskets on the stairs. This cuts down on the number of trips up and down the stairs needed to put certain items away. It's an assigned spot for items that are upwardly mobile — literally — which keeps clutter out of sight until it goes to a more permanent resting place.

Finally, using the space underneath the shoe cabinet turns under-utilized areas into homes for lesser-used items — think winter gloves in the summer and flip-flip shoes in the winter. The organized TikToker also taps other places, like under the couch and the bed, for the same purpose. Bins of drawers sit at the end of the couch, just waiting to give toys and games a spot to hide until the next time gameplay commences. Systems like these mean fewer things get left out or lost because everyone in the house, including the kids, knows where everything is supposed to go.

A messy house does more than just make finding your shoes more difficult. Clutter taxes your working memory, and in the worse-case scenarios, it gives you and your kids a serious case of cognitive overload. By creating solid cleaning routines, you don't just get rid of shoe clutter; you're helping your family reduce the cognitive load of housekeeping. 

The human brain doesn't work very well around clutter because the mess requires you to be constantly processing too much information. This makes it more challenging to sort the relevant from the irrelevant information in an environment, including where to put that random pile of video game boxes in the middle of the living room floor. A cluttered environment has also been shown to increase levels of the stress hormone cortisol. If everyone in your home seems on edge, your home's clutter might be to blame.

Additionally, when you approach your organizational objectives with forethought, you give yourself space to consider how their roles in you and your kids' routines might change over time. For example, the Candyland- and Uno-laden storage basket that doubles as a coffee table when the kids are young is the same item that can hold Xbox controllers and gaming headsets as the kids get older. This reduces the likelihood that you'll be forced to do a major overhaul on the system down the road. Home organization becomes self-replicating, and no one gets a short-circuited brain because anti-clutter routines are too hard to follow.