Decluttering Kids Clothes for a Stress-Free Home

I sat at the kitchen table of a new friend’s home, deep in conversation as my two children played with some of her eleven. Yes, eleven. Between sips of hot lentil soup and side glances to make sure my baby, Elena, wasn’t covering their expansive book collection in teeth marks, the topic of laundry came up. I felt an immediate flood of tension. She barely knows me, and now I might disclose our unspeakable kids’ clothes situation.

Kids’ stuff was a real source of reactivity for me before my decluttering journey began. Just that morning I had angrily stuffed fistfuls of kids’ clothes in the trash can so I wouldn’t have to wash and fold them again. A few days ago, I had chucked a toy across the room, embedding it snugly between the couch cushions. At times I’d think of Paul’s words in Romans 7:15: “I do not understand what I do.” When it came to my reactivity, they resonated.

My eyes shifted to the softly falling snow outside. I decided to be open. What did I have to lose? With her being a mother of eleven kids, I figured she could sympathize with laundry talk.

I took a deep breath. “I’ve been behind on laundry since our second baby was born a year ago,” I confessed. “It’s mainly kids’ clothes. Washing them is no problem, but it’s the folding and putting away part I can’t seem to do. Honestly, since we still co-sleep, we just throw the clean laundry in the crib and dig it out of there.”

She remained silent. Surely I had a “laundry chaos cohort” in this new friend. Surely, she had five stories that would each one-up my dig-from-the-crib system. But what she said surprised me. “Figure out a system now,” she began gently. “The sooner the better.”

While her response certainly wasn’t the one I expected, it was the one I needed. Figure out a system. I felt something shift within. I was being firmly challenged to step out of the overwhelm. Maybe a clutter-free home with kids wasn’t unattainable. Maybe I could declutter my kids’ stuff—toys, clothes, all of it—and finally counter the chaos that accompanied their copious stuff piles. All I had to do was figure out how.

Less is more

The solution came while packing for our annual Thanksgiving trip outside Seattle: What if the only clothes I had to manage for my two children were the week’s worth of outfits that I had packed into this neatly ordered suitcase? Rolling clothes tightly, I fit five outfits per child in the suitcase. If I could do laundry as needed, this amount should be sufficient. I decided that if our girls thrived with limited outfits on this vacation, then I’d replicate this “suitcase experiment” at home.

As expected, fewer outfits led to content, adequately clad children—and a lot less laundry to do.

When I got home, I hauled the carry-on into their room and surveyed the disorder of their overstuffed closets. “They don’t need or use all this stuff—the multiple matching pajamas, the rows of colorful dresses, the drawers teeming with T-shirts. They didn’t miss it on vacation and won’t now,” I thought.

For the first time in a long time, I felt a spark of excitement while staring at piles of clothes.

Motivated to re-create the suitcase experiment, I lined up a good chunk of childcare and got to work. First, I grabbed our suitcase and, imagining a week’s vacation, packed only what our girls needed. I zipped the suitcase and set it aside. I pulled the rest of the clothes off hangers and out of drawers and put them in bags to save or donate.

Hours later I had three big bags of kids’ clothes ready to donate and one bag to save for next season. Then I opened the suitcase.

Organizing was easy. When tightly rolled, my daughters’ wardrobe items all fit neatly into their own ten-by-twenty-inch drawer: a row for dresses, a row for pants, a row for long-sleeved shirts, and a corner for underwear. A few special dresses hung in the closet. Every item had a home, and every item was something my daughters frequently wore.

Practical steps to decluttering

If you have kids, you too can re-create the suitcase experiment. Here’s how:

Get a large suitcase (or multiple suitcases if you have a large family). Imagine you’re going on a weeklong vacation where you can do laundry as needed.
Pack a week’s worth of clothes for each of your children (include them in the decluttering process if you feel they are ready to help—more on this in the “Kid-Related FAQs” section). Consider weekly activities (swimming, soccer) and favorite outfits. Experiment with keeping fewer outfits than you think you’ll need.
Separate the remaining clothes into donate and keep piles, and bag each pile separately. Put them out of sight for a while and see if your children miss anything. You can easily retrieve an item if they request it. Your “keep” bag is for out-of-season clothing (I kept five to six out-of-season outfits per child).
Unpack the suitcase and find a home for each item. This is where it will go when you put away laundry or quickly tidy up a room.
Tweak the process as needed. Remember, this is an experiment. You can make changes until you have a system that works best for your family.

My sign that the suitcase experiment was an immediate success was the day I caught Eva putting her clothes away independently. She had gone from toting piles of clothes around the house like it was a game to voluntarily caring for her clothes, all because of an environment change.

Consider a few extra resources: