With the blooming flowers and warming temperatures, people use spring as a time to clean, take stock, and refresh their lives with a bit of organization. Children are quite tuned into the rituals that their grown-ups are engaging in at home. Their play often reflects this as they use imaginary iPhones to order food, enjoy sweeping imaginary messes with brooms and dustpans, and like to pretend to water the plants in the garden or pots.

Whether or not your child already mimics you cleaning the house, it is important to include them in the process of cleaning and tidying. Helping your child understand the benefits of a clean environment is paramount to maintaining those good habits when they grow up. In this guide, we’ll give you helpful information, tips, and chores that you can do with your child to get them interested in cleaning and tidying around the house.

Cleaning with kids

Before we can jump right into creating cleaning tasks for our children, it is helpful to think about a few questions. 

What is the goal? 

While we all love a clean home, getting our kids to clean with us is most likely not about getting them to actually clean the house. More likely, parents want to engage their child’s sense of taking care of their things, creating a zen space, and/or helping them learn to let go of things that no longer serve them, a la Marie Kondo. 

Montessori educator Amii Spark explains that cleaning up is important for children because “the task of children is to develop into adults. In order to do this they must practice and take part in day-to-day activities; otherwise they simply will not understand why they should take care of their environment, or develop the skills to do so.”

How can we scaffold? 

Scaffolding is an instructional teaching term that refers to the supports given to a student throughout the learning process. It involves putting the “just right” amount of accommodation or modification in place to position the task and child at the right level. 

So if you are thinking about a cleaning task with scaffolding in mind, you need to consider the following: 

• Point of entry
• How to prime the child to want to participate
• How to make the challenge level appropriate. 

It might make sense to break the task down into more manageable snack size steps. Instead of “today we are going to clean out the hall closet,” it can be, “let’s take everything out of the closet and make piles of what we want to keep and what we don’t want to keep. We might find some fun things in the process!” It’s important to continuously monitor and assess their progress, adjusting the degree of support as they go along, and eventually fading the support and/or increasing the degree of difficulty, or in this case the degree to which they can help clean/tidy/organize independently. 

Where do I start?

It’s helpful to start from a place of interest. Where do you find your child watching you when you are at home? Do you often find yourself tripping over them in the laundry room as you move piles of laundry? If so, are they curious about the machines or do they just want to roll around in the piles of clothes? Do you see them yearning to get their hands on the vacuum or spray bottles? Or, do they seem to like when you pull all the books out of the shelves and reorganize them by color? 

Start where your child is most interested and give them a heads up that you’ll be doing some tidying and that you’d like their help. Try to move away from imparting wisdom, “Cleaning is a great life skill…” and move towards engaging their skills and interests, “I’ve noticed you love getting your arms in a sink full of soap suds. I was thinking we could get a mountain of bubbles going and clean some of those LEGO bricks of yours. Maybe we can even go through them and see if we can create some mini LEGO kits for kids without toys?” That would free some space up in your closet for other things. Either way, we can have fun cleaning them in soapy water, organizing them, and then go from there.” 

Spring cleaning chores and scaffolds for children of varying ages

Toddlers

1. Laundry: Matching socks, taking things out of the dryer or putting things in, organizing dirty clothes by color to go in the washing machine. 
2. Shoe sorting and tidying: Lining up shoes or putting them with their pairs in hanging shoe bags. 
3. Organizing the lower kitchen cabinets/drawers. Take all the pots and pans out, let them do their thing with them while you model stacking them by size order, sorting lids, and putting them nicely back in.

Preschool-aged children 

1. Recycling. Shredding mail or paper recycling, finding papers in the house that need to be recycled. 
2. Gardening. Repotting plants (with help), watering plants, digging. Learn more about the benefits of gardening with kids in our article.
3. Dusting and sweeping. Give them control of the dustbuster and let them attack the dust under the couches and beds - there’s a challenge they’ll love! You can build some pretend and dress-up play in and make it cave excavation and treasure hunting all rolled into one. 

School aged children 

1. Toy culling. Have them go through their things and ask themselves what sparks joy and what do they feel comfortable “thanking and saying goodbye to.” (You’ll need buy-in from your child for this one, so you might want to mention that it will free up more room for ——”. Fill in the blank with something your child has been hoping for an upcoming birthday or holiday. 
2. Garage or family room tidying. Give your older child some ownership by working with them to organize a specific space. Then, they can get more say in how that space is used, so they feel more like it is “their” space. This is a great way to teach responsibility to kids and give yourself some help around the house.
3. Keeping a clean bedroom. When your child is school aged, they should know that the expectation is for their bedroom to remain tidy. You can help them make and keep this goal by setting up specific times for cleaning (for example, every Sunday before dinner) and joining them as they clean. That makes the task feel like bonding time rather than a chore.

Remember: the goal is not to send them off to clean on their own. That’s where it may start to feel like punishment for them. One of the benefits of scaffolding is that it keeps you present with your child and makes it feel like time together, while still keeping some power and independence in their hands. It’s an opportunity to spend time being productive together. Move away from the ideas of compliance and “earning your keep” and head straight for a strengths and interests based approach to family and home betterment. 

Ultimately, the more you build cleaning and tidying together into your family culture, the more easily it will come for your children. That means it will become less of a spring project and instead it will be part of everything you do. Ending play time a few minutes early to clean up before dinner (with help!) everyday will be the foundation to larger scale spring organizing projects. 

We hope this cleaning for kids guide has inspired you and your family as you get ready for spring cleaning season. If you are looking for more information on why chores are beneficial for kids, check out our other guide! And if you are looking for exciting in-person and virtual camps and activities, check out what our educators are offering on Sawyer.