12 Tips to Keep a Clean House with Kids (from a mom of 5)

Inside: If you’re wondering “How do I keep a house clean with kids?”, you might feel like it’s impossible ( and let’s be real – some days, it is!). But these proven tips will make keeping the house clean with kids so much easier.

When you have your first baby, you suddenly understand just how hard it is to do ANYTHING with children.

Seriously, how much effort does it take to go anywhere! You used to just grab your purse and hop in your car. Now? An hour later, and five trips back inside (make that six), you’re off!

Cleaning the house is another one of those things that gets exponentially harder with kids.

In the beginning, when you only have a baby, the two main problems are finding the energy to clean the house and having your hands free to clean anything (a baby carrier has been a personal life-saver for that – my babies lived in that thing when until they were about 2-years-old).

Overcoming those two obstacles to cleaning can feel like climbing Mt. Everest, but next thing you know, you’re trying to keep your house clean with a baby and a toddler.

If you add one or two (or four, like me) more kids to the mix, keeping your house clean can feel darn near impossible.

Because as those kids grow, so does their stuff. I swear, it multiplies while we sleep.

Related: 7 Simple Rules for Decluttering Toys for Easy Decision-Making

12 Tips to Keep Your House Clean with Kids

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Kids seems to be pure stuff magnets, whether it’s the five drawings they made for you this morning, the toy (most likely toys, plural) grandma gave them last week, or all the paraphernalia it takes just to go anywhere with kids!

And then there’s the dumping, the constant dumping. I’ve outgrown this stage, thank goodness, but I will never forget the frustration I felt when I heard the sound of toys hitting to the floor from yet another dumping session.

Even though I have gone through the toddler years three times already, I still cannot for the life of me understand the toddler compulsion to dump out everything: folded laundry baskets, toy bins, flour. It’s all fair game as far as they’re concerned.

But I want to tell you, there’s hope. You can keep a house clean with kids.

Here are my top 12 tips as a mom of five, written from the trenches of the little years.

Related: My Favorite Minimalist Cleaning Supplies That Make Cleaning Easier

1. Declutter Once, then Declutter Regularly.

The more stuff in your house, the harder it will be for your kids to learn where things belong and be able to put them away on their own. My favorite place to start is in the bathroom because you get to throw away a lot of stuff and most of it is not sentimental.

Find Step-by-Step Directions for Decluttering Your Bathroom HERE.

If you make it through the entire house, you might think you’re done. But if you want a clean house, you have to embrace the concept that decluttering is never done (especially when you have kids!).

Set up at least one donation bin in your home to put things that need to leave your house.

Related: 21 Minimalist Habits That Will Keep Your Home Clutter-Free for Good

2. Everything has a place, and everyone knows the place.

You probably know that catchy phrase: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

As cliché as it sounds, it really does work, but IF and only if, everyone in your family knows its place. The real trick is to make the “place” make sense, both to you and to your family.

If you put the coffee mugs at the opposite end of the kitchen from the coffee maker, it doesn’t make sense. If you put the coat rack across the room from the door, those coats are most likely going to be dropped on the floor.

Observe your family’s habits and organize your home in a way that fits those habits (not necessarily your habits).

3. Rotate toys, or create a toy checkout system.

After we finished decluttering our toys, we still had more than I wanted to keep out all the time. After a few weeks of going crazy, I created a simple toy rotation system instead.

We’ve needed the actual chart less and less often, but about a third of our toys are still put away in a back room, mostly puzzles, games, and Little People.

(I love these bins because they’re cheap, sturdy, and a good size – having the same type of bin can help you stay organized).

Related: A Hassle-Free Approach to Toy Rotation for Busy Moms

4. Keep baskets and racks kid-accessible.

If your kids can’t reach the coat rack, they are probably not going to be very inclined to hang up their coats. If the dishes are out of reach (even with a stool), they can’t put away the dishes from the dishwasher.

If at all possible, buy kid-height hooks and coat stands. Organize your kitchen so they can reach their own dishes.

Use open bins so they don’t need to struggle with lids to help tidy up the house.

5. Establish cleaning routines.

If you haven’t established cleaning routines yet, you need to! (Don’t feel bad – it’s taken me eight years to establish a cleaning routine that works for me!)

Daily cleaning routines work best when worked into your morning and evening routines. You want them to become habit – to feel like something is missing when you don’t do them.

Daily cleaning routines keep clutter at bay so that your weekly cleaning routine takes far less time. A weekly cleaning routine generally takes on actual deep cleaning, as opposed to simply tidying.

As your kids grow, they may eventually become more helpful in the cleaning department, depending on your chore philosophy of course. At the very least, you can teach them to develop their own daily cleaning routines to keep their own spaces clean and organized.

When you’re in your toughest seasons, focus on the kitchen, and if the whole kitchen is too much, just the dishes. Make sure a dishwasher load is running and at least one counter is clear and wiped down before bed. Tomorrow you will be so grateful!

Related: A Realistic Homeschool Mom Cleaning Schedule

6. Clear your surfaces.

Clutter loves company. When your surfaces are covered in knick-knacks, it’s so tempting to set something down next to those knick-knacks.

After all, the surface wasn’t clear to begin with. What harm is there in adding one more thing, just for a minute?

One more leads to one more, and all of a sudden, you have a clutter magnet that has attracted every random object your family was too busy to return to its proper place.

Keeping counters clear prevents clutter from accumulating where it doesn’t belong.

7. Keep your systems simple.

Kids stay organized when the organization systems are simple. They need to be easy to understand and uncomplicated.

While us moms may love sorting all the toys into 15 different bins (color-coded for the win!), a child will spend twenty minutes standing in front of them with his toy hammer wondering which one it goes in.

You want to make clean-up fast and efficient. The fewer categories and bins there are, the better.

You Might Also Like: 5 Bare Minimum Cleaning Tasks to Prioritize When Life Is Crazy

8. Create systems to quickly corral clutter until it can be put away.

We liberally use EMPTY bins and baskets throughout our home to corral clutter.

As we are tidying up throughout the day, we put things in the appropriate bin (my daughter has her own room, and her own bin).

About once or twice a month, we take each bin to the appropriate room and put away the contents.

This saves SO much time and energy, as its much easier to carry a single bin to the room once a week than run multiple items up and down the stairs all day.

9. Teach kids how to clean their rooms.

My kids know that Monday is “reset day”. Unless something unusual happens that week, Monday is the day we clean our house, including their rooms.

My daughter, at age 8, is finally able to clean her room by herself. My boys, ages 6 and 4, are sorely in need of guidance and support to get the job done.

I talk them through each step of the cleaning process, and if they are working hard, I “work hard beside them” (that’s the actual phrase I use). They are learning how to put things away, bring objects that don’t belong in their rooms to the appropriate places in our home, vacuum, and take out the trash.

I absolutely loved this book, when I was a kid! As an A-type, neat freak, I read it over and over again, and I still follow most of the step-by-step instructions for how to clean a room to this day.

10. Reconsider how you fold your kids’ clothes.

Back when we lived in a small home, the shared dresser space for the kids was super tight. Discovering how to fold our clothes the Kon-Mari way was a life-saver!

Folding clothes the Kon Mari way kept drawers neat and tidy, for the most part. They could easily see everything and pull out the shirt or shorts they want.

When we finally upsized our home and had more space, I started reconsidering folding clothes altogether. We homeschooled, and no one really cared if there was a wrinkle or two in their t-shirts.

So I stopped folding clothes for the kids. And eventually, I adopted a no fold system for my clothes as well. Life’s too short to fold clothes, in my opinion.

11. Let your kids organize their own stuff.

Once kids hit a certain age, your organizational systems may no longer make sense to them.

Have you ever had someone clean a room for your and put things away where it made sense to them? I bet you couldn’t find a thing.

Once, my daughter reorganized my office supply drawer, and I was so frustrated! But it helped me understand how it feels to have your stuff moved around.

Kids probably feel that way A LOT. They just don’t know how to express their frustration in words.

12. Remove dumping temptations from toddlers.

I admit that as you have older kids in the mix, this gets much harder to actually accomplish. Sometimes, your older kids will need things accessible. It’s harder to do in a small house as well. But if you want to keep your house clean with a toddler, remove as many dumping temptations as possible!

They do grow out of the dumping phase, I promise. I’m saying this to remind myself, too. But their dumping and exploring can drive you crazy, so find a different way to store your toys or remove the temptation altogether.

• Keep your cupboards locked with these safety clips (they might as well call them “sanity clips”).
• Put folded laundry basket up on a high dresser.
• Keep just a few toys out and store the rest (then rotate them).

Keeping Your House Clean with Kids Takes Creative Thinking

You have the power to change how your home functions with creative thinking and flexibility. If something isn’t working, be innovative! Persist until you find a solution.

• Enlist the kids
• Change an organizational system
• Put certain toys away for a while
• Buy paper plates during busy seasons
• Require kids to clean up before having screentime
• Declutter your stuff

Sometimes, you just need to stop obsessing over having a clean house, especially when you’ve just had a new baby or made some other major life transition. Sometimes, you need to step over the toys and just WALK AWAY.

Last, but not least, if you have ADHD or maybe you have twins or are working with littles, THIS book is a true lifesaver. KC Davis offers emergency cleaning hacks for anyone in a season of life where they feel like they can’t keep up.

Grab a copy of How to Keep House While Drowning HERE. Thank me later.

You’ve got this!

Read Next: How to Keep a Clean House While Homeschooling – 5 Essential Tips

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