My daughter is a little over two, and through well meaning family and friends we have more toys than we know what to do with.
My wife keeps buying what are essentially (fancy looking) big boxes and just dumping everything in them. Love my wife, but that’s not working, it’s just hiding some of the mess in a box.
We end up with these hardly ever opened boxes full of unorganized piles of toys that we end up having to dig through to find anything specific, and the toys that my daughter is actively using just end up scattered around the floor so they don’t disappear into the box dimension.
Every once in a while my daughter opens and digs through the boxes and dumps half the contents on the floor anyway (not like she can see specific things to grab what she wants) and then we just kind of arbitrarily choose some of it to put back in the box and a new combination of mess to leave out.
Unfortunately we have another baby on the way, so I’m probably not getting my wife to let us toss any of it right now.
I’m leaning towards cubby shelves with individual bins for different “types” of toys like her daycare does, but I wanted to hear what strategies other parents tried, and what has and hasn’t worked.
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Sorting toys is a mug’s game, especially when there are a lot. Makes sense for some things that go together like LEGO, but how do you even decide how the rest goes together. Size? Material? Whether they get invited to the tea party? Randomly in boxes seems fine to me.
One piece of advice is if you have someone who gives large toys even after being asked not to, you are certainly within your rights to ask that the toy stay at their house.
- put them in small boxes.
- Put a bunch of the boxes away from where your kid is. Every week or so, rotate the boxes, so your kid has access to “new” toys she hasn’t seen in a while.
- before dinner (or some other natural break) put toys back in their lil boxes.
Friends of ours did this. They seemed to avoid the infinite pile of toys our kids ended up ignoring, and it kept their house relatively clean.
Edit: fixed formatting.
We had some rotated out as well - that worked well, but it does sound like this kiddo is looking for something specific. Avoid rotating out those heavily loved toys!
Definitely. The point is to keep the toys interesting, not deprive the kiddo of their favourites.
Big pile in the living room, smaller piles around the house, and more yet in his room…
oy i’m suffering with the same problem. i thought id try rowing toys out but more the boxes i’ve bought to rotate are all overflowing. id get rid of them more but she has an amazing memory and months age not seeing a toy will suddenly talk about trying to find it.
We’ve been filtering out a lot of toys trying to decide the “best” ones and donating to goodwill the rest, we just dont have room for all this stuff and she mostly plays with hair ties and non toys than her actual toys
