Whether Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin of The Home Edit are prepping their upcoming Netflix series or working on one of their celeb clients’ homes (ahem, Lauren Conrad, Mandy Moore and the Kardashians to name a few), organization and ease are always their primary goals.
When we chatted with the tidiness experts thanks to their partnership with the Capital One Quicksilver card (it gives you 1.5% cash back on all your purchases for what they like to call “necessary bonuses”), Shearer and Teplin shared tips about how to teach notoriously messy members of your household to keep their space clean. That’s right, we’re talking about kids.
The Home Edit founders explained that organizing by color (as seen above) is your best bet for a child’s space.
“If a child is going to be using something, organizing by color is way more predictive for them and more intuitive and easy to use,” they explained. “You wouldn’t want to organize something by the alphabet for a child that is just learning how to read. Organizing by color makes a lot more sense.”
Not only does organizing your kiddo’s space in ROYGBIV order make instinctual sense, but it will also help involve them in keeping their space clean and help them build good habits. So why does it work?
Shearer and Teplin pointed out, “The rainbow is actually like a label in and of itself. It’s not a vocabulary word, but organizing by the rainbow is literally like a set of instructions and it acts as a label…It’s telling you where to put it back. You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s orange. It goes between red and yellow.’”
As far as other child organizing tips? The Home Edit team suggests one tool to keep the chaos contained.
“A general-purpose toy basket,” they said. “Something that can hold big bulky things. You can do several of them depending on what your kids play with. [But get] something that can hold big categories, like train track parts or building blocks, LEGOs, dolls. The smaller bins can be very useful, but the big multipurpose bins solve a huge issue.”
Making organization fun for little ones in a visually appealing way? We’re down.
