A few weeks ago, our kids were chronically misbehaving. Our oldest, a tween, was sassing back and saying “no” too much, her younger sister (the “spirited” one) was throwing lots of tantrums and trying to cause trouble with her sisters, and our youngest daughter was constantly upset and insecure about the continuous chaos in the house. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so one day while the oldest kids were at school and the younger ones were sleeping, my husband took off work for an afternoon of “toy culling”. This is a drastic discipline measure we only use in emergency situations. It is time-consuming and intensive labor for the parents, but well worth it, at least in our house.
Toy culling consists of us going into the girls’ room (the three oldest girls share one big room, and our baby boy isn’t yet old enough to cause trouble) and taking out every toy. We leave the tv, computer with educational games, books, and the clothes and board games in the closet. Everything else goes – dressup clothes, doll clothes, dolls, stuffed animals, all the little miscellaneous toys that can really junk up a child’s room quickly, etc. If you have lots of time, you can sort it all by what you want to keep and organize the rest, but we are very busy people and so we just took all their junk and put it in our son’s room for now. He’s a baby who wakes in the night so he’s still in our room. When it’s time to move him into his room, we’ll have to clean it out obviously, but for now it was a means to an end of the horrible behavior of the girls. We leave the board games, and they know that they take one out and put it away when they’re done, just like the books that are left. If the rules aren’t followed, anything that’s left on the floor in subsequent days gets culled. You need to check their room everyday, and it’s imperitive that you follow through with rule-enforcing. And for some reason, this process really works. I don’t know what it is… Perhaps a feng shui effect where the much more pleasant ambience of the room and the mucho extra space is what leads to the kids being in better moods and hence, less trouble and more obedient. It could be the fact that there are less toys over which to fight. Maybe they’re happier not having it constantly hanging over their heads that they’re going to have to clean their room. But I don’t care what the reason is, the toy culling has worked wonderfully the 3-5 times we’ve had to set aside a chunk of time to do it. My kids are now putting their dirty laundry in the hampers that are provided, and their trash is going into garbage cans. Also, their room is staying clean, and I don’t have to worry about it staying that way because they don’t have anything with which to mess it up! And, as the behavior improves, they can earn their toys back – you don’t have to spend money to get them any special reward PLUS the kids feel senses of accomplishment = WIN/WIN. Toy culling proves that less is more, and it helps put a damper on the sense of entitlement that can cloud the good attitude of even a generally well-behaved child.
I think I first read about the method in a parenting column in the newspaper. I’m not sure which expert gets the credit, but I do know that I highly recommend toy culling! And oh yes, early December is a perfect time to do this – makes room for the burst of new things they might receive for the holidays!
I remember a similar process in which a room full of baseball cards were put into large garbage bags (sometimes 5 heavy duty size). Not mine but those of my roommate growing up. It worked for a while, but within a wee or two, they would be right back where they were. Mom would go up while we were in school and spend the day shoveling.
Ah yes… it does seem to work on every kid. But your parents let themselves down on the follow-thru… not easy to make sure the kids stay out of the ‘forbidden’ zone, as you well know, especially when there’s 4 of them! They tend to gang up on the parents!
I did toy culling too, but sometimes they never got them back. If they didn’t miss it, it wasn’t too important. Unless it was Barbie shoes on the floor (any other small toy) If I stepped on it, goodbye. I had to pull one of the Barbie earrings out of my foot once, so this was my way of handling small toys on the floor.
For some reason, it never worked on the oldest. Her imagination was just too good, she didn’t need any toys to have fun.
Culling- makes me think of one of the shows I watch, Stargate: Atlantis. Only it’s not toys that get culled. Let me just leave it at that lest there be nightmares…
Sounds like a good tool for the parental arsenal. I don’t think I ever had toys culled, but I remember my aunt telling me how she would throw her kids’ coats outside if they left them on the floor.