She couldn’t believe her eyes.

girl wear green crew-neck shirt near the yellow plastic box — Photo by zhenzhong liu on Unsplash

Standing in the doorway to her bedroom, staring at the corner where her stuffed animals used to be.

But no fluffy bunny to be found.

My client described a moment from her childhood. She recalls her eyes welled up as she stood still for a while before burying her face into the pillow and wept.

This memory resurfaced while we were decluttering her bedroom closet. She told me her mom warned that if she didn’t clean up her stuffed toys, they’d be thrown out.

Her mom kept her word.

As an adult, a parent of a 5-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, she can see it both ways.

While she respected her mom for following through on her words, part of her still wishes it hadn’t been so black and white.

Because while a lesson was learned, it turned out differently than what her mom had intended the lesson to be.

Three decades later, my client struggled with her overly packed closet. Her kids’ closets were the same, because she found it just as hard to let go of their things as her own.

The fear of anything leaving her home kept her stuck. And even when she made attempts to declutter, she often ended up closing the closet door with a sense of shame, guilt, and defeat.

Her story sounds dramatic, but it’s more common than you’d think.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, a question in my comments was raised about whether a three-year-old could start making her own decluttering decisions.

That question, next to my client’s story, is what got me thinking about how much that very first introduction to letting go matters, and how much a parent’s approach to it can shape the years that follow.

For a lot of parents, letting a three-year-old decide what stays and what goes feels like the same thing as permissive parenting, like handing over the reins altogether.
But trusting a child to choose isn’t the same as stepping back from guidance. It’s respecting that they’re capable of deciding something, on their own terms, with you right there beside them.

Part of what makes this hard is that a parent is often looking at the item through a lens, focusing on:

What it cost
How much mess it makes or space it takes up
What it took to buy it
Who gave it to them

Their child is looking at it through a completely different one:

How it feels when they interact with it
The significance of the moment it became theirs
Every moment it was a part of in their imagination

❤️

Sometimes, my job is straightforward: making practical decisions.

But on that day, that not-so-random memory served a purpose, one that would eventually lead my client to successfully declutter her entire home with her children.

The truth is, holding on can feel safe, even when what you’re protecting yourself from is long gone.

My client hasn’t lived with her mother in decades. There was no one left to enforce a rule, no threat of anything being thrown out. But the fear stayed anyway.

If this resonates, perhaps you also had an early experience where your survival instinct kept you in a frozen state when it comes to making decisions about your things. Many of the parents I’ve worked with came to find out that the pattern of holding on became a language their children learn to speak too.

But I don’t blame you. Our choices are shaped by what we know or experienced in the past. Our bodies are designed to avoid what brings on discomfort, and sometimes when we stay in that discomfort long enough, there’s a strange ease to it, one that can feel easier to continue the behavior than making a change.

Unfortunately, that approach isn’t sustainable.

And for many families, the delay cost them more time, energy, and friction than whatever they’ve been holding on to.

That’s when people reach out to a home organizer, a parenting coach, or someone like me who’s combined both, to literally and metaphorically sort through how they got here, and find a new path forward.

In my client’s case, I also worked with her kids and husband, so the whole family could continue toward a new norm, together.

And to the surprise of many parents, kids who practice these decisions as early as three years old begin to build a steadier relationship with their belongings. Letting go gets easier, because it was never something that happened without them knowing. Instead, they experience a sense of empowerment that continues to nurture their ability to trust themselves to decide.

In the video lesson below, I walk through how to bring your child into these decisions in a way that’s developmentally appropriate, one that takes into account a child’s sense of belonging and respected within the family.

With time and consistency, kids build something bigger than an organized room. They build trust in their own instincts, and the confidence to make choices they can stand behind, within the safety of parents who believe in them.

I hope this has been helpful to you.

Paid subscribers, can continue to learn the how-to video lesson and download the worksheet and printables below.

I’m planning a future post about when the parents have an easier time making decisions but find it challenging to get their children to let things go. Consider becoming a free subscriber to receive that story in your inbox when it comes out.

Joyfully,
Ann

Can 3-year-olds declutter their own stuff?

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