If you find your kid’s closets are too full, here’s a minimalist approach and 5 ways to simplify their wardrobe. Minimize kids clothing in your house in order to make laundry day and getting dressed much more simple.
Minimize Kids Clothing:
1. Make a laundry schedule.
This might seem like an odd step to begin with, but think about how often you do laundry and then work around this. For example, if you do laundry once a week then you’ll obviously need at least a week’s worth of clothing. If you find yourself doing laundry twice a week, you might get away with having less. If you don’t have set times to do laundry, think about implementing this so it becomes more organized.
2. Keep tops and bottoms that mix and match.
If you have too much and are trying to pare down, I suggest keeping items that easily mix and match with each other. I do this by choosing pants that go with most of the tops: jeans, khakis, or colours that match a lot of existing items. That one mint-green-butterfly-patterned outfit that has pieces which specifically need to be together? Yeah, that’s the one to go. When everything goes together it makes it simple to grab a top and a bottom. And if you have kids who insist on dressing themselves, you’ll have the added bonus that they’ll actually pick things that match.
3. Store off-season items.
Eliminate the chaos of having everything in the closet or dresser at once. Only keep the items for this season, and then store and label any off-season clothes. I use a big Rubbermaid bin which sits on the top shelf in their closet. This also applies to any clothes that they will grow into soon. However, don’t get carried away with storing for seasons, otherwise this will become another source of clutter. Depending on the climate you live in, perhaps organizing twice per year could be enough: a Spring/Summer season and Fall/Winter season.
4. Pass on clothing.
I know that other people approach this differently, but I choose to give away clothes as soon as my children grow out of them. One way that clutter accumulates quickly in homes is when we keep items ‘just in case’. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of people give me second-hand clothes for the kids, and I buy clothes only when there’s a gap in their wardrobe and a specific item is needed. Since I’ve been given so much, I’d like to pass on things to other people too. I’d rather give items to someone who definitely needs it now, than keep things for my own ‘someday, maybe’. (The easiest time to go through clothes is when the seasons change since you’ll have to adjust their wardrobe anyway.)
5. Keep closets simple.
I keep the kids’ clothing in bins instead of a dresser. Each child has one box for tops (T-shirts, cardigans, and sweaters), one box for bottoms (shorts, pants, and dresses), one box for underwear (including socks and bathing suit), and one for PJs. Instead of hanging or folding clothes, I simply sort the clean clothes into the correct box. This makes it easy to put clean clothes away, and easy to find things in the morning. When I move the boxes onto the floor, the kids can sort their own clean laundry!
