Miss Messy Learns to be Tidy: Room Bucks and the Family Thrift Store Explained

It has been my experience that girls generally will mature into wanting a tidy room.  When they are little we try to help them by establishing a clean-up routine, be it daily or weekly, but eventually they start taking the initiative to keep thing tidy without mom having to tell them. Appreciation for beauty and discipline creeps in with age, and watching it happen is wonderful time, indeed!  In our house this has usually started to happen around age twelve and until then, well, I just wait and train as best I can :)....and sometimes I am better at it than others!

 This being said, our youngest daughter spent the summer having huge issues with clothing all over the bedroom floor. ( You may remember that she is my child who is forever dressing up like historical figures!). I tried limiting her clothing options, but then we ended up with too few clothes for our laundry routine, and good clothes that were stained because she didn't have a good supply of play clothes. One day, after reading a wonderful post by Kelly at Generation Cedar, I came up with the idea of Room Bucks. Kelly had the great idea of limiting her children's clothing, but putting the extra clothing in a "Family Thrift Store" where the children could buy extra items as they needed them. ( It turned out she was having the exact same issues we were having with limiting clothing...I love that about blogs! Somewhere out there is another mom with your problem! Anyway...) Our youngest children really don't regularly have money of their own, so I decided to give her the chance to earn one "room buck" ( play money) during random, daily room inspections. If clothing was put away properly, she would earn one buck. I also reserved the right to charge her a room buck if "the maid" had to come in and take care of a mess before guests arrived ( or for some other reason). I limited her to just a  few outfits, but gave her the chance to "buy" her items back from the Family Thrift Store for 5 room bucks each.  Dress up clothes could be rented for 1 room buck each, which would be returned to her once I saw that they clothes were put back properly.

The results have been amazing. She has enough motivation to put things away properly and is gradually getting back some of her clothes as her self-discipline increases. I no longer need to nag or feel exasperated over the mess. Love that! I see that she is beginning to grasp the concepts of both simplicity and stewardship, as Kelly talked abut in her post. I really love that! How do you help your children learn to clean up after themselves? Do you have ideas to share on teaching simplicity and stewardship? How has another mom inspired you recently?