As part of my series on decluttering with kids, I want to talk about helping them to let go.
It’s difficult enough for us as adults, we get these attachments to the things around us and we think we might need it. Or we have some sort of memory held within the thing, some sort of good time. We think things like “Oh, I can’t get rid of that because it was an amazing time”.
We pass all these things down on to our kids and they pick up the same traits basically.
So when we’re trying to declutter or to get them to declutter, we need to do the same things that we would with ourselves.
One of the best tips I’ve got for working with people is instead of them focusing on what they’re losing, is to try and focus on what somebody else is gaining.
With adults that’s about which charity shop is it going to? What cause means something to you? Getting you to really identify with the people that you’re giving the stuff to, which makes it so much easier to get rid of the things that you don’t need anymore.
It’s exactly the same with kids.
Kids are so loving and caring and giving you know they really want to help others but they can’t sort of see past “But that’s mine” you know. So getting them to connect with the people that they’re going to be giving this stuff to is really really important and it helps them to let go.
Showing them pictures of people who maybe haven’t got as much, getting them to think about the people at school who haven’t got as much, or other people that they know. So anybody that they come across in their daily lives that they might be able to think “Actually I can give them my teddy because they haven’t got many Teddy’s”.
Get them to really connect with that.
Videos and things like that online can work, but obviously it’s not about traumatising your kids with horrendous photos, but trying to get them to sort of see how much they’ve got compared to what somebody else has got is a really really crucial way to help them.
That just enables them to let go.
I worked with a family and the three kids at beginning we’re like “that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine” and once we’d started talking about it, they were “oh, they can have this, they can have this, they could have this”. And they were so excited about giving it away to somebody else.
Especially during times where there are so many people who’ve got less than what we have.
We can share that around.
Get your kids to connect with it and that can really help.
Good luck with that and let me know how you get on.