Inspiring the Family to Embrace Decluttering

In this episode of The Simple Joy Show, I dive into the shared journey of decluttering as a family.

I offer insights, tips, and anecdotes that can transform decluttering from a daunting task into a cherished family experience.

Whether you’re struggling to motivate your teenager or finding a middle ground with a sentimental partner, this episode offers a roadmap to a harmonious, decluttered home.

Tune in to transform, bond, and find joy in the simple act of letting go.

USEFUL LINKS:

How to Get Started Decluttering When Overwhelmed PDF: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/overwhelmed

30 Day Decluttering Challenge: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/challenge

Facebook Group: The Simple Living Society: www.facebook.com/groups/thesimplelivingsociety

Instagram: www.instagram.com/hellosimplejoy

Shop: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/shop

Transcript

Hayley Forster [00:00:00]:

Hello, lovely listeners. Welcome back to the Simple Joy Show. Now getting your family in on the decluttering journey isn’t the easiest task, but actually a group effort is the best way to reduce your at home stress and clutter. So how do you encourage your family to declutter? Whether your house is full of stuff you want to get rid of or you just want to teach your children about the value of living with less. There’s lots of different ways that you can make it fun and encourage your family to see your perspective and get them on board with your decluttering journey. And that’s exactly what I wanna talk to you about in today’s episode.

Hayley Forster [00:01:40]:

One of the things we will be doing during our half term, which is definitely not as exciting as pumpkin picking and Halloween mazes, is doing a little bit of decluttering, and I’ll be getting the girls involved. But actually inspiring your family and your household in general to simplify and declutter, actually is quite a big task. It’s not something that is easy, especially when you’ve got a lot of different personalities and attachments at play as well. But with a little bit of patience and understanding and just working together, it actually can be quite a fun family activity to do.

Hayley Forster [00:02:29]:

It took me a few years to grasp how to get the children on board because they have got very individual personalities. My oldest doesn’t have a lot of emotional attachment to things, but she is very messy. She’s the type of child that will play and craft with things and then decide when she’s finished, she just gets up and walks off and she leaves things wherever they were – so you can imagine how well that fits with me! It’s took a few years of her trying to get in the mindset of “right, I’ve finished with this now. I can move on to something else. But before I do, I need to finish this exercise by putting the things away that I’ve been using and playing with.” It took us a while and we’re still trying to manage it, particularly in her bedroom.

Hayley Forster [00:03:24]:

It is a very messy bedroom. She’s only 12 – I get it. It’s part of growing up and that’s fine. But I really want her to take responsibility of her own space and try and understand what clutter is and how to process it and to just have a nice living environment. So that’s something that we’re trying to tackle with my oldest. Now my youngest, she is not as messy, and she’s very good at, if you say “go and tidy your room or can you clear this away”, she will just get up and do it.

Hayley Forster [00:04:01]:

But her little thing is sentimentality. She has a lot of things that she likes to keep for memory’s sake. She’s very like me when I was little, and she’ll keep little mementos. She loves writing comics and drawing pictures, and she loves keeping all the drafts and everything like that. So with her, it’s a little bit more of a different challenge because it’s more about understanding the connections and the attachment she’s got with her items and how to process those with her as well. So they are 2 very different children, 2 very different personalities and challenges, that we need to navigate through. But as I say, it’s a learning process. It’s something that we’ve been doing for a few years now. And with just a little bit of patience and understanding and just trying to do things together collectively as a family, actually, we get on alright with it.

Hayley Forster [00:04:54]:

But today, I just want give you a few little snippets and ideas about how you can navigate getting the family to embrace your decluttering and how you can get them on the journey with you. So the first idea I have is just first to be honest and share the vision with them. Start communicating about why you want to do it. Because there’s one thing saying “We need to declutter. We need to clean this house. We need to sort it out.” And it’s another to actually say, “Imagine what our home would feel like, where we could easily find our things. We’re not getting into little arguments because we’re struggling to find the things that we want, we want to play with, we’ve got enough space to play, and generally, we feel more relaxed.”

Hayley Forster [00:05:42]:

So try and paint a really vivid picture for them that resonates with what each family member would want. If you’ve got young children, focus on the ability to find their toys and play with them. If you’ve got older children, talk about the things that they enjoy doing and being able to have more time and space to be able to to focus on that. Because ultimately, everyone has unique motivations. The reason why I want to declutter might be very different to Susan down the road. So perhaps your teenager wants a more streamlined bedroom so that they can can get more involved with their hobbies or be able to handle their homework more. (I don’t think that’s a worry for my daughter who doesn’t enjoy homework at all!) But for some, it can be a major thing where they don’t really have anywhere to sit and do their homework, and they don’t have anywhere to keep their books, their pens, anything like that.

Hayley Forster [00:06:38]:

So that could be a real motivator for them as well. So what you wanna do is just tailor the vision for each to your family members and their aspirations and what they’re wanting to do and how they want to use the spaces in their home. And you can also use that knowledge to personalize the process as well. So perhaps your younger child loves the idea of doing treasure hunts. So you could use the process as a, “oh, let’s find the treasure that we’re gonna give to the charity shop and we’re gonna donate to other people who are in need.” And you can tailor the approach to each family members’ interests as well. The second idea is to just create a little bit of a game plan. So trying to define your roles in the decluttering process.

Hayley Forster [00:07:24]:

Are certain people in charge of certain rooms? What’s the timeline? What’s your expectations of when things that have to be done by, and then just break the process down into much smaller manageable tasks. Then set them little goals so that they don’t get overwhelmed. This is something that I really had to manage with my eldest child. Because if I would just say to her, “look, your room really needs a sort out. It’s very messy.” She would either get so overwhelmed to the point that she just wouldn’t do it, or she would sit in her room and she would get upset. And neither of those things I wanted to happen. So what we had to do was just really break it down and just say, “look, you’re in charge this room, I would like you to have this room sorted by 2 o’clock or by the end of the day.

Hayley Forster [00:08:14]:

Now let’s start caught up with some smaller projects. So first of all, let’s look at the clothes. Sort through your clothes. Get all your clothes into 1 pile. Actually, anything that’s, dirty, goes in the the laundry basket. Anything that is clean needs to go into your wardrobe”, and just break it down into much smaller manageable chunks. Then that makes it’s much easier for them to process and actually want to start in the 1st place. And actually by doing that with my older child, she gets so much more done and and she gets it done so much quicker because she isn’t just stood in a room thinking, well, where on earth a start.

Hayley Forster [00:08:54]:

And we’re trying to get to the point where her room doesn’t get in such a state so that it doesn’t become overwhelming for her. It’s about really understanding and creating an ongoing maintenance thing with her, which is something that we are battling through at the moment. But just know that you’re not alone if if this is something that you’re struggling with with your children, particularly when they get into the teenage years. It’s very difficult for them to understand the responsibility of owning items and looking after and being responsible for putting things away, etcetera. So, yeah, it’s it’s an ongoing challenge, but these are some of the things that I find really work for us. The third idea is try making it fun so you could set up little family challenges. So for example, you can say, “who can collect the most things in 10 minutes to declutter or to donate”. Or you could say that as a family, can we collectively find 50 things to donate this weekend that we can get out of the house? You could try making them nice, small, manageable

Hayley Forster [00:10:00]:

to kick start and get it quite competitive. Or if you’re really thinking about wanting to do something longer term, I have got the 30 day decluttering challenge. I’ll add the link in the show notes, and that’s when you do a small decluttering task every day for 30 days. And you can get the whole family involved. So get them involved in each of the different areas or you can say, “Tuesday is your task. Thursday is your task. This is what we’re doing”. So get them all involved in that as well.

Hayley Forster [00:10:29]:

Don’t just feel that because you signed up to a 30 day challenge that all of it falls on your shoulders. Get them involved and get them passionate about it as well. One thing I would touch upon, and this is something that I touched on in the last episode as well, is just have respect for other people’s items. Yes. It’s important to declutter, but it’s also really crucial for you to respect people’s personal spaces and their personal possessions. So what you can do is just let each family member take charge of their own areas. If there’s certain areas in your teenager’s room that they want to do themselves, then let them do that. Perhaps you can guide them and assist them if they need that help or they’re struggling to declutter things, then get involved.

Hayley Forster [00:11:17]:

But don’t just go straight into the room of your husband or your child and just start getting rid of stuff off. Obviously, if they’re younger children, then you’ve got much more sway in the things that they own anyway. But perhaps when they’re a little bit older, you might want to give them the autonomy to focus on some of their own things themselves, give them the chance to sort through it. And if they’re struggling, then you can step in and guide them and help them at that point. Another thing you can do is celebrate the wins. So whether they have decluttered a drawer or they’ve organized their wardrobe, what you want to do is try and celebrate those little victories, whether they’re big or whether they’re small, depending on what stage they’re at. With my children, particularly my eldest even if she does something quite small, we like to try and do a little reward so that then she gets the motivation to keep going, because she does find quite difficult. So perhaps you could suggest things like a family movie night or a special outing.

Hayley Forster [00:12:19]:

You could go out to the cinema or you go to the park just as a little reward for the the family collective effort that they’ve been putting into the decluttering process as well, which is nice. We like to sit as a family and and watch a movie and perhaps get a pizza in. We call them pizza parties, which we really enjoy doing. Now if you have much more of a bigger task at hand, so you’re wanting to declutter your whole house and there is a lot of clutter in the process, and it becomes much more of a a longer term project. What you wanna do is try and make it much more of a routine. So you could set up regular family check ins and just say, how are we getting on? Let’s keep the momentum going. And then it’s just a chance for you to just reassess where you’re at, what you’ve managed to do, what’s not working and to celebrate what you have done as well. And it just keeps that momentum going and really just ensures that it’s top of mind for your family members that they understand that this is a journey and it’s something that that you’re on together, and it becomes part of the family culture at that point.

Hayley Forster [00:13:34]:

And they understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and it’s something that you’re all doing together actually to get to that end point of back to those aspirations that we talked about at the beginning. And then finally, just some little maintenance tips, you could set out some little family rules that your family members have to follow. So for example, no one leaves the dinner table without taking the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, or you can’t go to bed without tidying up your toys before you go, things like that. And that just helps the children understand what they need to do at certain times to maintain things as you need them to be. I also recommend doing a big declutter near any of the children’s birthdays or Christmas times as it really just helps create space and more organized order for anything new that’s coming into your home. Because when children have too much stuff, they just become overwhelmed. It’s really hard for them to get things out to play with them, and it’s really hard for them to put things away so having a declutter and asort out before those special occasions can really help. And actually the girls love doing that, I’ll just say, “Christmas is coming up,

Hayley Forster [00:14:47]:

let’s have a little declutter. Let’s see what space we can create because Santa’s gonna bring you some nice gifts. And we need to make sure that there’s space in the house so that we can keep them all nice.” And the girls really enjoy doing that. And it’s become a little tradition for us as well. So the girls expect it. And the last thing I would say is that if your family is really messy. And it’s causing you to become really overwhelmed.

Hayley Forster [00:15:12]:

Just sit them down, talk to them about it, explain your feelings, share any ideas that you’ve got about how you can make it better for the future and just set some realistic goals with your family, discuss about what actually is acceptable, what is okay for you as a normal level of mess, what is classed as too much to you, and is overwhelming for you and perhaps what chores that they can take on to help tackle these areas around the home. And you can even set up some little family trackers as well, which can be something that can really help and get them to take responsibility for their space so they don’t just see the home as something that mammy and daddy sort out. It’s something that they’re all involved with and they’re involved in the upkeep and the maintenance of it as well, and they become much more respectful of the place. So hopefully this has been helpful. And just remember decluttering as a family isn’t just about letting go of stuff. It’s really about strengthening those family bonds, understanding each other, understanding each other’s triggers and their goals and their aspiration, and just being able together to create a harmonious home where everyone can feel relaxed and comfortable in. So thank you for joining me today on the Simple Joy Show.

Hayley Forster [00:16:34]:

I’m always eager to hear about your stories. So let me know if you’ve been able to get your family on board with your decluttering journey. I’d love to hear how you did it. Share your experiences, your challenges, your victories, come into my Facebook group, The Simple Living Society, and you can share those with my community. But until next time, cherish the journey and the joy it brings. And I’ll see you next time.