Taking care of your home is a lot harder when you’ve got two or three mini-mes running around. They’re going to make a lot more mess, by nature of being kids, and it’ll be a lot harder to communicate with them about why they shouldn’t do so. This often means parents have to do a deep clean on a near daily basis, and even then, it might not feel like your home is quite clean!
But that’s a big problem. Being a parent shouldn’t be made harder by the appearance of the home, and there should be no shame in having some mess around. Even if someone else thinks it should be uber clean and always neat, it doesn’t really need to be! As long as you feel comfortable in the way your home looks, and you don’t mind spotting a bit of dust here and there, you’re doing an amazing job already!
If you’re struggling with finding this kind of balance, tips like the ones below can help. The less time you have to spend on keeping the house clean, the more energy you’re going to have for being the parent you want to be.
Keep Your Schedule Lax
Kids can make a home messy in the space of five minutes. Trying to keep up with this will make your body ache, unbalance your budget for the month with all the cleaning supplies you’ll have to buy, and you’re just going to run out of time to get anything else done. You’ve still got the dinner to cook, bathtime to get through, and hopefully you’ll be able to squeeze in an hour of TV and ice cream too!
You deserve plenty of time to yourself, so make sure your schedule stays lax when it comes to regular cleaning. You can plan a deep clean once a quarter and dedicate some proper time to the corners of your home, but while you’re just going round on a daily basis, don’t block book your cleaning tasks in.
Get the Kids Involved
If you’re rushed off your feet with trying to keep the house clean, and the kids don’t have a wall chart that lists the tasks they need to do each week, maybe this would be the best time to institute one? If you get them involved you have at least one more pair of hands on your side, and that makes the work go twice as fast.
Sure, they might not complete the jobs to the same standard you do, but they’ve got a lot of time to learn about that sort of thing. For the meantime, they’re taking part and learning the ups and downs of living in a home.
For some parents this might sound a bit like growing up too fast, but we highly recommend getting the kids to do at least one thing around the house each week. Drying the dishes after you wash them, for example, or making their own beds. One thing is better than nothing, and these kinds of tasks only take about five minutes to get done, which leaves plenty of time for playing!
Hire Some Skilled Help
Most parents use the time when the kids are at school, a friend’s, or in bed to clean up the house. However, you’re going to need plenty of time and energy on your hands to tackle the bigger tasks! Don’t get bogged down in how much you’ve got to do when there’s plenty of people you can hire to help out.
From gutter cleaning and window washing to descaling the washing machine and trimming the garden, hire someone to get the job done for you. It’ll free up time in your schedule, take a weight off your mind, and keep your house cleaner (and more hypoallergenic) for the foreseeable future.
This is definitely a tip to use if you can’t quite get your mind off of how dirty the windows are right now! And seeing as there’s plenty of skilled labor out there for you to rely on, you won’t have to worry about the quality of the end result either. The task gets done, your home both looks and feels cleaner, and you barely had to lift a finger – what a winning combination for a parent!
Leave the Kids’ Rooms to Them
This is another thing the kids can be in charge of that won’t change the dynamic of your household too much. Their rooms are their domains, and if the room is messy, it’s up to them to clean it! And while this may take a bit of convincing to get them to see, the more you grant responsibility over their rooms, the tidier they’re going to be in the long run.
Show them how to keep the room clean, like running the vacuum round the carpet and putting all their toys in the box when they’re done playing, and then leave them to it. Once they get the hang of things, you can cross at least a couple of rooms off of your to-do list. Remember, your kids’ rooms are going to be theirs for at least 18 years, so they need to know how to take care of them.
Perfect Your ‘Ten Minute’ Routine
You’ve got ten minutes to clean the house before you need to leave for work, a meeting, or to see a friend – how can you use these minutes most effectively? That’s where a strategic ten minute cleaning routine comes in. This looks a little different for everyone.
If you’ve got nothing else to do – and we literally mean nothing else – focus on the room you’re in or the storey you’re on right now and be as speedy as you can. If you’re downstairs, and there’s a living room, kitchen, and dining room, speed walk through each one and see if you can immediately spot something that could do with tidying.
We recommend looking low first and then sweeping your eyes upwards. You’re not here to dust or catch the cobwebs off the ceiling, but if there are a few books out of place, you’ll still catch and fix them during these ten minutes.
Don’t Let the Clean Home Image Get to You
It’s quite common for parents to follow other parents on social media. Doing so can make you feel more supported in your parenting choices, surround you with like minded people, and you can pick up a few useful tips along the way.
However, there’s a bad side to this effect as well. Parenting influencers tend to be quite curated and only show off what they want you to see. That often means they have perfectly clean homes, with not a single thing looking out of place. While this is a nice image to project to the world, it does make parents on the other side feel a bit bad about their own homes!
So discount the idea that their home looks like this at all times. When the camera is off, mess crops up – trust us on that one!
If you’re worried about the state of your home, don’t be! You can clean when you’ve got the time, and if there’s a guest coming round, you can make good use of your ten minute routine to straighten things up a little. And remember, don’t let the kids get away with all that mess! Get them involved in housework as well – it’ll be a good lesson for later on in life.