We are not minimalists. I want that established before anybody pictures a serene white room, because there is a plastic tractor in this house that plays a song I could pick out of a police line-up.
The reason we did this was tidying. Forty minutes a night, most nights, and a floor you couldn’t cross in the dark — none of which the Saturday list could touch, because it was a weekly job against a daily problem.
Sixty things, none of them played with
The thing I hadn’t understood is that a room with everything in it isn’t a room with more play in it. It’s a room where a four-year-old walks in, looks at all of it, picks something up, puts it down, picks something else up, and after eight minutes is standing in the middle asking what there is to do.
Fewer things out and they play for longer. Considerably longer. I don’t have a mechanism for this beyond the fact that it is very obviously true in this house, and everyone I’ve mentioned it to has said the same thing in a slightly surprised voice.
How we do it
Four boxes in the loft. Labelled — eventually, after a winter of going up and opening all four every time, which was entirely my own fault.
About half of everything is up there at any point. We bring one box down every six weeks or so. Not all four: we tried all four, at Easter, and there was so much new at once that they played with none of it and it all just became the floor again.
One box is enough to be an event. Something that has been away for two months comes back genuinely new, and the tractor gets a fortnight of intense attention every time it reappears, which is a sentence I would rather not have written.
The mistake I made first
I did it while they were at my mum’s.
I thought — and I still think this was a reasonable thought — that it would be easier for everyone if it just happened. They noticed within an hour. Not the specific toys, at first; they noticed the room, and then Nell went and looked for one particular thing that she had not played with since the summer and found it gone, and the whole afternoon went.
What I had actually done was take away the sense that their things were theirs, which was not what I meant to do and was exactly what I did.
Now they choose. It takes longer, it involves a certain amount of holding things up and being asked to wait, and it is completely fine. It stopped being a bereavement the moment it stopped being something done to them.
Shallow beats deep
The big toy box has gone. It looked tidy and it functioned as a hole: things went in and did not come out, and when I emptied it there was a stratum at the bottom that I would date to about 2023.
It is the same mistake I made for two years with the paperwork, in a different room.
Everything downstairs now is on open shelves at their height, all visible. It looks less tidy than a closed box. It is used about four times as much.
The rule I introduced at the wrong time
One in, one out, announced on the 23rd of December.
I don’t want to talk about it.
Things people email to ask
- How does toy rotation actually work?
- Put roughly half the toys out of sight, then swap a portion of them back in every few weeks. Ours live in four labelled boxes in the loft and we bring one down about every six weeks, which is often enough to feel new and rare enough that nothing gets forgotten. The point is fewer things visible at once, not fewer things owned.
- How many toys should be out at once?
- Few enough that a child can see all of them from the doorway. We do not count, but the working test is whether the room can be tidied in five minutes — if it takes forty, there is too much out, and the tidying cost is what made us start. Sixty things visible meant nothing got played with properly; about half that and they play for longer.
- Should you get rid of toys without telling your children?
- We tried it and I would not do it again. They noticed within an hour, and what we lost was not the toys but the sense that their things were their own. Letting them choose what goes up to the loft turned the whole thing from something happening to them into something they were doing, and it stopped being upsetting almost immediately.
- Is a big toy box a good idea?
- Not in our house. A deep box is a hole with things in it: the top layer gets played with and the bottom third has not been seen since 2023. Shallow and visible beats deep and tidy, even though deep and tidy looks better in the ten minutes after you have done it. Everything downstairs is now on open shelves at their height.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Presents for people who say they don’t want presents
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
The Saturday list that finally stuck
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
The medicine drawer, after the winter we had
Between November and March we had two sickness bugs, one ear infection, hand foot and mouth, and a fortnight I have mostly deleted. This is what’s in the drawer now, and what I wish had been in it at three in the morning in January.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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