10 Easy Ways to Encourage Your Kids to Clean their Room: Day 14 Decluttering Challenge

Hey friends! Day fourteen of our decluttering challenge is to declutter a kid’s room, so I am here with five helpful tips to motivate your kids to clean their rooms.

Can you believe we are on day fourteen? That means we are almost halfway through this challenge! Go us!!

If you are new here, no worries. We’d love to have you jump right in on day fourteen or start at the beginning. All the information you need for the challenge is at the bottom of this post.

I do know many of you don’t have kids yet, or you don’t have kids at home any longer. This is a great day to do a guest room because I do not have guest rooms designated on any other day of the challenge.

I hope y’all are having fun with this. Let me know if there is anything you’d like me to add to the videos or any questions you’d like me to answer. I read every comment that is left on this website or on YouTube.

Today we will start with the video. Our day fourteen task is decluttering a kid’s room for fifteen minutes.

Instead of decluttering in today’s video, I’m sharing our best tips for motivating and instructing kids to declutter their own room.

By “our tips” I mean my husband and me. He has a surprisingly simple method called “the magic door” that works so well for younger elementary age kids. The other tips are from both of us. Sorry, Alan isn’t in this one. I’ll try to get him to be in another video with me again soon.

Oh yeah, in the video, I did get it wrong by saying “day thirteen.” Oops! Day fourteen!!

10 Easy Ways to Encourage Your Kids to Clean their Room:

#1. The Magic Door Game (To learn about this game, watch the video above.)

#2. Have a giant toy box in any room your kids play. That way they can easily throw toys into a giant bin real quick.

#3. Don’t just say “clean your room” to a child. Break the job down into easy tasks.

#4. Make it fun by giving them a simple mission, like a 10 Fling Boogie: Tell them to throw away 10 things.

#5. Ask them to go on a hunt to find 5 books or toys they don’t play with anymore.

#6. Have them pick 10 things out of their floor.

#7. When it’s messy, have them do a 25 Fling Boogie. Pick twenty-five things out of their floor.

#8. Grace and Patience. They are only learning how to keep their rooms neat. I can’t even keep my house all tidy, and I’m in my forties, so I certainly cannot be hard on them about this!

#9. Play upbeat music for them and dance while you clean.

#10. Oh! One more tip. People love praise, young or old. Praise the heck out of your kids when they do any tidying up for sure. It encourages them to do it more and more.

Also, I do think it helps if you join them in the cleaning, especially when they are younger.

When the boys were little bitty, they would do whatever I was doing. If I was throwing toys into a bin, they loved doing it too.

Also, it would always make them suddenly way more interested in their toys. Have you noticed that? Then they would sit down and start playing with their toys nicely, completely engrossed in their play. And I would think, “Awesome,” and just finish cleaning up myself.

Actually, that still happens sometimes.

Feel free to can all of my helpful hints for motivating your kids to help clean, and just charge into your kid’s room to do the decluttering solo today.

Sometimes a parent has to do what a parent has to do. Last week, Alan went into one of our boy’s rooms and deep cleaned it. It was out of control, and Alan couldn’t take it anymore. Our son was at school, and when he came home and found his room suddenly clean and picked up, he was surprised and grateful.

Hopefully, you can use some of those tips any time. We mostly tend to do the magic door at bed time. If we didn’t, we couldn’t make it across the minefield of toys to put the boys to bed!

Be sure to come back tomorrow for day fifteen. We will be officially halfway through the challenge. On day fifteen we are decluttering the laundry room for ten minutes. That will hopefully be an easy one.

Need a printable 30 Day Decluttering Challenge list? Here it is below.

To read the full 30 Day Decluttering Challenge introduction with links to each day, see this page.

Thank you for joining us! I hope you play some peppy music and dance your way through this today. Hey, that’s another good tip. Kids love to clean with happy music too!