Tips for Encouraging Your Toddler to Pick Up There Toys

As soon as my son could start crawling he started crawling over to his toys, which were in two shallow containers. I soon discovered that clean up was going to be a bit harder as he could pull out every single one of his toys and place them on the floor, and that is exactly what he did. By the time he was walking around very well his first birthday had passed and so he had many more toys and now could take them off of shelves, out of bins and take them in other parts of the house. Clearly I knew it would be some time before I would be able to teach him how to pick up after himself but in efforts to get him to help out I did a couple different things. Now as a toddler at age 20 months he does help out with putting his toys away and I thought I would share some tips to other parents who find their toddlers to be less than enthused to help out with clean up.

One of the first things that I did when I wanted to encourage my son to help put his toys away was try to make putting toys away fun, sort of like a game. At the time he had two bins that all of the toy went into, for easy and fast clean up. I set a toy in one of the bins and then clapped and cheered. Then I handed him a toy and he put it in a bin and I clapped and cheered. We did this a couple times a day and after a couple days when he put a toy away he would clap and cheer too. We switched it up a bit, as some of the toys were sorted more specifically. All of the Little People animals and people that he had were put into a silo of one of the sets that he had and the wooden blocks that went into his shape sorter were stored in it. Pretty soon I started to noticed that toys were being put away even when I wasn't right their next to him cheering and encouraging him. Now of course sometimes a horse made its way into the shape sorter and a block or two might have ended up in the silo but still I thought it was wonderful that my son was putting away his toys.

The other thing that I did to encourage my son to put his toys away was that I worked with him to put other things away, like books back on to shelves when he was done looking at them and now he will even turn off his remote control car when he is done playing with it. All in all I think that first making it a game and then later explaining how to help put toys away is a great approach to getting your toddler to help put their toys away.