consequence for not picking up the toys

[jackson'smama]

ok, i've had enough. my 4.5 ds has SUCH a hard time with toy pickup. it's an easy system in that we have a playroom and every single thing has a "home". he usually takes toys out of the playroom and into the living room, dining room and kitchen. he just doesn't want to put them back. he makes it very clear when he says a) "i don't want to, b) "you do it", or c) "i'm too tired (or something like that).
i am tired of it. we are neat people so there is no lack of modeling. we offer to help and until now, i've just picked it up myself saying something along the lines of "we're family and we all live here together and it's everyone's responsibility to make our house nice to live in, blahblahblah. " not always all of that. i try to keep it brief when he's actually listening.
my latest idea is to have the rule that if i have to pick it up alone and he is able to help or do it himself then the toys go into timeout.
my questions are:
1) is this just totally wrong of me to do? if so, tell me why and offer alternatives
2) if it's ok, then how does he actually get the toy back - time period? doing something specific? what?
please help me. i am so tired of MULTIPLE issues with my 4.5 year old, but this is the one i'm tackling first.

[Funny Face]

Dd is 3 and if we have more toys than she is willing to help clean up then some of them get put into the closet. I don't see it as a consequence since it's not something I verbalize or that she really seems to notice. It's just a way of making my life easier and the logic is if we have too many toys, lets cut down some.

More than half of dd toys are in the closet and it's cut down on the big messes. If she wants a toy out we first do a little clean up in her room and then she can trade one out. Same thing goes for books.

It also helps her not lose interest in her toys. She gets really excited to get out a 'new' toy she hasn't played with in awhile.


Some moms may not do this but if there is a huge mess and dd refuses to help at all I make her sit in one spot until she is ready to help. She's free to get up whenever she is ready to help, which usually only takes a second or two. I don't mind helping but she needs to understand that when we make a mess we help clean it up. That's part of being responsible in our play.

[EVC]

my latest idea is to have the rule that if i have to pick it up alone and he is able to help or do it himself then the toys go into timeout.

This is what I have been doing with my 3.5 year old and I can say that it works with her, but a part of me feels icky about it. On the one hand, it seems like an appropriate "natural consequence" to me and that is how I frame it to dd: if you can not clean up your toys, then you can not play with them. But, on the other hand, a part of me thinks that I am just justifying making threats of punitive manipulation and that makes me feel, well, as I said, icky. I will also mention that I have never actually had to follow through: as soon as I tell her that toys that she does not at least HELP clean up can no longer be played with, so starts cleaning up. So, as I said, it has "worked" for us. But something about it seems wrong to me.

I am interested in what others have to say about it.

[MayBaby2007]

I throw them away. Or put them away until she's ready to pick up what she destroys. (She's 2...but she's smart. She knows darn well what I'm talking about when I tell her to do something).

She has a kitchen center in the kitchen. She doesn't play with any of the accessories, she just throws them ALL over the floor. I packed them up and put them upstairs. When she's ready to play/pick up all 100 pieces, she can have them back. I'm tired of having the kitchen look like a tornado went through (and stepping on them .

I actually really did throw some stuff away once. I was cleaning and asked her to pick up THREE items. She flat out refused, threw more on the floor. I told her, "Pick them up or they're going into the trash can." I started putting them in the trash. She said "No, mommy. No." THEN, she picked them up. This mama means business. I don't give a rat's butt about material objects and will throw them away if she can't pick them up (Either really throw them away or put them away until she's old enough to pick them up).

This will be the standing rule as she gets older. Don't pick up toys=toys get thrown or "thrown" away. Seems fair to me.

(My flame proof suit is all zipped up. Fire away! )

[Limabean1975]

Originally Posted by EVC

This is what I have been doing with my 3.5 year old and I can say that it works with her, but a part of me feels icky about it. On the one hand, it seems like an appropriate "natural consequence" to me and that is how I frame it to dd: if you can not clean up your toys, then you can not play with them. But, on the other hand, a part of me thinks that I am just justifying making threats of punitive manipulation and that makes me feel, well, as I said, icky. I will also mention that I have never actually had to follow through: as soon as I tell her that toys that she does not at least HELP clean up can no longer be played with, so starts cleaning up. So, as I said, it has "worked" for us. But something about it seems wrong to me.

I am interested in what others have to say about it.

I do & feel the same as you. I say something like "whoever picks them up gets to decide where to put them - if I pick them up I will put them somewhere out of reach". It often works but it definitely feels wrong/icky. I too will be following this thread for hopefully better ideas.

I do like the idea of putting alot of toys away then doing trading out.

[MammaV]

I feel that if a child cannot manage picking up his/her toys, then there are too many. I pack up the toys the kids cannot manage and they can get them later. It might be a month or two. After they've been picked up and out of site, we go through them first when it's time to donate to charity. I feel that we live in a way too materialistic society and kids have way more than they need. I don't feel bad about getting rid the overabundance of toys!

[MayBaby2007]

Originally Posted by MammaV

I feel that if a child cannot manage picking up his/her toys, then there are too many. I pack up the toys the kids cannot manage and they can get them later. It might be a month or two. After they've been picked up and out of site, we go through them first when it's time to donate to charity. I feel that we live in a way too materialistic society and kids have way more than they need. I don't feel bad about getting rid the overabundance of toys!

:

[jackson'smama]

okay, glad i'm not alone...thanks for the replies.
first, we've tried doing the toy "library" thing where we keep many in the attic, some in the playroom and we trade. problem is he wants us carting things to and fro about once or twice a day. the rule was if you want this out of the attic then something has to go to the attic and he'd choose what he'd be willing to give up only to want to trade to have it back the next day. oddly, this child has a ton of toys and knows them all well and plays with all of them. biggest infractions are train sets (we have a wooden set, my old "junky" train from when i was a child, and my dad's lionel very nice train). he'll want to set up a train going through a city and will incorporate all of his little people stuff (airport, parking garage, school, main street), then he'll get out the plastic bricks (1950's style legos) and build some buildings. then it's the wooden blocks to make roads/sidewalks. then it's the miniscule little signs and trees and power poles. then he's done and moves on leaving this city on my dining room table while he wants to go run in the yard or something. he doesn't want to set it up in the playroom on the floor if that's what you're thinking. we've tried that.
how do your children handle the toy "library". i guess i should just make a rule that toys get exchanged on such and such day just like our library books do. like it or lump it.
so, any ideas on the returning of toys that i had to pick up? maybe if i instill the toy library exchange day that the impounded toys go into that system and can be retrieved on the next exchange day?

on a side note - to those that felt it was wrong to essentially "punish" not picking up toys - can you tell me why? i kind of feel the same way, but i can't figure out a way for him to learn THIS IS WHAT WE DO! if i just keep saying it but don't actually follow through with some sort of action, it seems that he just listens, does his own thing, and is perfectly accepting of me cleaning up his messes. this includes cups and plates, clothes, shoes, coats - things that he puts where he last used them and they never end up where they need to go unless i put them there.

maybe this is a whole other thread, but how is this consequence of pick it up (or at least help) or it's gone (for a while or permanently) truly hurting a child?

[mum21andtwins]

honestly at 4.5 is to overwhelming often my nearly 5y/o ds has difficulty with it.
eventhough h only has a couple of baskets of toys out
I get a handpuppet (we have many) and it tells him what to get and where to put it. we usually do this whilst I make lunch and whilst I make dinner. I might point really annoying things out inbetween.

[sunnmama]

Originally Posted by jackson'smama

on a side note - to those that felt it was wrong to essentially "punish" not picking up toys - can you tell me why? i kind of feel the same way, but i can't figure out a way for him to learn THIS IS WHAT WE DO!

I don't punish not picking up toys. I *do* weed out toys that are no longer used to donate (nothing the kids want), and rotate toys to keep the toys more manageable. But I don't throw away or remove toys because they haven't been picked up (in the interest of honesty, if a particular toy/mess is driving me crazy, I will quietly store it for a while, but would bring it back out if they asked for it. But "out of sight, out of mind" sometimes works).

Playful parenting usually helps my young kids clean up. We sing the clean up song, race to pick up the most toys, have challenges to toss toys into a basket, etc. But playful parenting also drives me nuts a lot of the time

What usually works best for us is to have the kids pick up toys right before doing something else really cool/fun. Does your son go out in the yard alone, or do you go with him? If he needs your cooperation (you go with him), I'd simply say, "We'll go out as soon as these trains are picked up. Do you want to do the trains or the tracks?" If he goes out on his own, I'd call him in and say "You may go out as soon as these trains are picked up......." I guess that is punishment, technically (if he doesn't pick them up, he doesn't go out), but that is our habit around here. Messes in their room can stay messy, although I do require my 8 yo to tidy up her room before having friends over.

A big BUT.....while my 8 yo is really good at this now, and accepts it as "what we do", she was NOT really good at it at 4. 4 is young--too young to expect tidy behaviors, imo. It doesn't sound like you are asking him to clean up alone, but my dd would NOT have cleaned alone at that age. At 8, she does.

Another thing--it sounds like your dc plays with his toys *amazingly*. And he might choose your dining room/living room over the playroom because it is closer to his people. And, he might resist cleaning up his train masterpieces because he plans to continue playing with it later. Just things to consider. Maybe have set times of the day to clean up those spaces (dining room before dinner, living room at bedtime), and let it go the rest of the day if it is organized chaos?

[SharonAnne]

I've been struggling with this too. DD will be 4 on Saturday, so it's the same age-range. Her favorite thing to tell me when I ask her to clean up is "But it's too hard!"

Someone upthread mentioned playful parenting, and that's what's worked best for us, too. We make it a game. We've pretended pirates were coming and we had to hide and bury our "treasure" (the toys were the treasure, the treasure chest was the toybox. Daddy was the pirate, and he was in the shower. So when he was done in his shower, we had everything all cleaned up and DD ran to him, yelling, "You can't have my treasure! AAAAAAAARGGGGH! : ) We've pretended we had rising water and we had to put all our friends (stuffed animals) in their boat (the stuffed animal box). The more fun and giggles involved, the more likely she is to help out.

Something that I've found that helps to curb the mess a bit (and, OP, it sounds like you're already doing this) is to make sure everything has a place, and we're going to stop using the toybox. I'm planning on getting a wall unit with totes from Ikea, and seperating toys out (fairies in this box, crayons in that one) so that it is super easy to find what the girls are looking for. I find that the biggest mess I deal with on a daily basis is what's left behind when she's trying to dig a barbie shoe out of her toybox.

We're going to be moving my girls into the bigger bedroom soon, and that's when we'll be doing the major toy storage change. I have big plans for that bedroom

Looking forward to reading more ideas!

[mamazee]

My first question would be what level of neatness are you expecting from him. I think you can have an expectation that, say, all toys will be put away at X time and again before bed. But to expect everything to be neat basically all the time might be a losing battle.

I would do like I said above - a couple of times a day say, "It's time to pick up now." And start picking up and give specific tasks for him to do, like, "Put the trucks into this bin." One task at a time. And I wouldn't expect him to think of cleaning up on his own till he's older.

I don't personally do the toy time-out thing because I try to avoid punishment, but that isn't an over-the-top punishment if you're OK with that kind of thing. A set amount of time seems arbitrary. Maybe until the next time he cleans up? IMO if you are going to use a punishment, the less arbitrary it is, the more likely it'll actually teach something.

[daniedb]

I do try to keep in mind that it can be overwhelming for him. He's still just a little guy, you know? So, in that vein, I do a lot of encouraging and positive reinforcement. I think it's silly to tell him, "go pick up" and expect him to do it the "right" way and pick them all up, without getting distracted or wandering away. Hell, I can't even do that sometimes! So, I try to ask very specific things and do it in small bites that make it easily accessible for him (i.e.: "pick up all your cars and put them in the blue bin, then come tell me when you are finished" "now find all the legos and put them in the lego box and come tell me when you are finished")

They need so much reminding and reinforcement at this age, it's just not going to happen on its own.

If he just resists and is being a goose about it, I read a technique that I LOVE and use frequently. Each family member of age has a box or bin for this purpose, and when I get frustrated and meet with real resistance, I pick up their stuff, and it goes into the boxes. It's like a time-out, and in order to get the things out of time out, the person does an extra thing around the house to free the item. We call it "jail", and they have to do a chore to get it "out of jail".

Again, keeping it simple, concise and clear are my keys to having success.

[Raene]

Thanks for this thread!

We have similar issues with our 5 y.o. I think putting toys in "timeout" sounds great. We just threaten to throw them out but never really do, which is awful (not to follow through).

I agree with the poster who said they have too many toys if this is happening. We often talk about how our DD would be happier if she only had about 3 toys. Honestly she just scatters things about and then forgets about them.

[holothuroidea]

Originally Posted by jackson'smama

okay, glad i'm not alone...thanks for the replies.
first, we've tried doing the toy "library" thing where we keep many in the attic, some in the playroom and we trade. problem is he wants us carting things to and fro about once or twice a day. the rule was if you want this out of the attic then something has to go to the attic and he'd choose what he'd be willing to give up only to want to trade to have it back the next day. oddly, this child has a ton of toys and knows them all well and plays with all of them. biggest infractions are train sets (we have a wooden set, my old "junky" train from when i was a child, and my dad's lionel very nice train). he'll want to set up a train going through a city and will incorporate all of his little people stuff (airport, parking garage, school, main street), then he'll get out the plastic bricks (1950's style legos) and build some buildings. then it's the wooden blocks to make roads/sidewalks. then it's the miniscule little signs and trees and power poles. then he's done and moves on leaving this city on my dining room table while he wants to go run in the yard or something. he doesn't want to set it up in the playroom on the floor if that's what you're thinking. we've tried that.
how do your children handle the toy "library". i guess i should just make a rule that toys get exchanged on such and such day just like our library books do. like it or lump it.
so, any ideas on the returning of toys that i had to pick up? maybe if i instill the toy library exchange day that the impounded toys go into that system and can be retrieved on the next exchange day?

on a side note - to those that felt it was wrong to essentially "punish" not picking up toys - can you tell me why? i kind of feel the same way, but i can't figure out a way for him to learn THIS IS WHAT WE DO! if i just keep saying it but don't actually follow through with some sort of action, it seems that he just listens, does his own thing, and is perfectly accepting of me cleaning up his messes. this includes cups and plates, clothes, shoes, coats - things that he puts where he last used them and they never end up where they need to go unless i put them there.

maybe this is a whole other thread, but how is this consequence of pick it up (or at least help) or it's gone (for a while or permanently) truly hurting a child?

OK.. this system is too complicated for ME to understand, I can only imagine how your 4.5 year old feels!!

I think the main thing is consistency. You cannot play with something else until you've cleaned up your mess. End of story. No questions, no fuss.

[holothuroidea]

Originally Posted by sunnmama

Another thing--it sounds like your dc plays with his toys *amazingly*. And he might choose your dining room/living room over the playroom because it is closer to his people. And, he might resist cleaning up his train masterpieces because he plans to continue playing with it later. Just things to consider. Maybe have set times of the day to clean up those spaces (dining room before dinner, living room at bedtime), and let it go the rest of the day if it is organized chaos?

I agree and you are brilliant! If your child thrives on routine, maybe you should set times to clean up specific areas.

[Ruthla]

I try not to see it as "punitive". I see it as "helping the child by reducing the toys to a managable level." Most of the time, with young children, it's truly a matter of the child being overwhelmed, and removing the extra toys IS helping them, and the do appreciated it (though they don't always appreciate it at the time you're pruning the toys.)

Sometimes, though, older children DO test limits or try to manipulate you into doing things they're capable of doing themselves. In those situations, threatening to take toys away if they're not cleaned up may take on a bit of a "punitive" edge, but an appropriate one. You give a verbal warning- "You clean up the toys or I'll put them away where you can't reach them." If the child is truly unable to clean up the toys herself, you're helping by reducing the toy load. If the child is testing limits and doenst' want to lose the toys, he or she will quickly put the toys away. If the child needs to "lose" toys first to understand that you're serious, that's OK.

I don't make "threats" I won't follow through on. I'd never say "I'm throwing out your toys" (except the broken ones) because I don't throw away things when they can be reused or recycled. I DO remove toys to locations a child can't reach, offering to return the toy in a day or a week (depending on how often the child was having trouble cleaning up and his or her general attitude towards cleanup). Getting toys back is usually contingent on good behavior- taking care of the toys that are left. If the child truly has too many toys, and/or the child consistently leaves a certain toy to be stepped on, I'll donate the toy to a thrift store or offer it on freecycle. I don't throw out toys, but I do give them away.

[ChinaDoll]

I like the idea of a toy library (we do rotate toys periodically) but would simplify your rules, with some hard and fast guidelines, like "we ONLY trade toys on Tuesdays" (or whatever day) once a week and stick to it. And maybe get him a little wagon that he could use to pull toys from the living room/etc back to his playroom at the end of the day.

[MammaV]

We do scheduled cleanups throughout the day. We clean up before lunch, before DH comes home from work and before bed. I set the timer for 15 minutes and we all go as fast as we can to pick up. The whole family scurries around putting things away. I also made sure that every toy has a home. I have lots of bins and baskets from IKEA that are labeled for their purpose. It's quite easy for DS who's 4 to push his bin around and throw playmobile pirate stuff in it, slam the lid on and push it to its place. We have a basket in the living room for library books only. Our toy box holds our duplos and nothing else. I put board books and small books in baskets and on the bookshelves. It's so much easier for a kid to throw 6 or 10 books in a basket and pop it on the bookshelf than to carry each one all the way back to the bedroom and carefully place them on the shelf! I'm amazed at how much the 2yo can pick up and put away. He gets right in there and helps.
My kids all have chores. They're expected to help set the table, clear the table, the 7 yo can run the washing machine and dryer and often helps there. She is also adept with the vaccuum! The two older ones put their own clothes away and help fold clothes. The 4 yo clears the dirty clothes out of the bathroom each day. All the kids love to dust.
I've found that by having the expectation that we all live together, we all work together cheerfully helps to foster family togetherness and makes tidying tasks a normal pleasant part of the day, not something to be hated. We have a little friend who always says, "I hate cleaning". I try to make cleaning a normal happy part of everyday, so it's not a big deal. If you make a mess, clean it up. If you need help, ask. That's our motto.

[patronia]

I'd make it clear that if they didn't clean up the toys they'd be put away until they could prove they would pick them up, then any that don't get picked up would be stored somewhere.