Reply to Back me up on being the mean, mean mommy

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[quote=Anonymous]Although now I'm veering off topic, sort of, I want to address this issue of keeping and not wanting to throw things away.

I have a daughter age 6 who has these inclinations, too. It must be common. :)

I told her straight out that in life we cannot keep everything, because we would wind up with too much.  Once our things start to spill on the floor and look very untidy, we know we have too much.  That's when we have to make decisions.  People who can't or won't decide and who can't or won't donate or throw away things they don't use can wind up living a stressful and dirty life.  That is why my job as a mommy is to help my daughter figure out what she has space to keep and what she needs to give away or throw out.

We do talk about this quite a bit.  "Let's go through our things." "Mommy is going to sort through the garage."  "Christmas is coming, and we should make room for new things, and give away what we don't use anymore."  "You want that toy, but do you have space for it? What will you clear out to make room?"  And I do this:  if my daughter doesn't clean up, I take a big bag and zoom through whatever's still on the floor, throw it in the bag, and put the contents on vacation.  My dad did this, too--and I understood what it meant.  Once after many, many warnings, he followed through with his ultimate threat: to donate the contents of the bag since it hadn't been sorted through.  Two things I learned from that:  (1) he meant what he said, and gave me lots of chances and (2) it didn't feel as bad as I thought it would to toss that bag into the donation pile. :)

For our kids, we have a place for special sentimental things, too: "time capsule boxes" where she can place anything that won't rot and that feels special.  I pull the time capsules down now and then so that we can look at them.  Homework and old tests that she is proud of get archived in a special three-ring binder.[/quote]

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