My wife had a mini-meltdown last night. She's an OCD introverted neat freak, and me and my 4 kids are all ADHD extroverted creative types. Needless to say, she feels overwhelmed most days, and we had a long discussion about the unsustainable amount of clutter our kids have strewn everywhere. Our youngest kid is borderline Aspberger's, and oftentimes she brings the entire household to a screeching halt over the stupidest things. She's very possessive over things like empty plastic toy packaging... like, seriously.
We've been talking about it for a while, and have taken steps to minimize already... but it's never enough. We're coming out of the Christmas season with piles of just useless stuff everywhere, and it's just too much. Getting rid of a few bags of clothes isn't going to even make a dent in our mess (because we have done so, several times, in the last few weeks). I even threw away two recliner chairs and removed our kitchen island, because we just didn't have room to store everything. I just unbolted that sucker form the floor, moved the AC outlet to the floor, and put it to the curb.
So basically, I'm going to have to do more than give minimizing some lip service. It's crunch time, and I'm gonna have to step up my game.
As a side note, do you collective "peoplez of teh interwebz" think minimizing kids' stuff is best done with, or without their knowledge? If they haven't touched something in 6 months, do you make it disappear? With #4 (our problem child) she generally takes change very badly... with her, it's better to put it away, and hope she doesn't notice it's gone. So far, that's worked pretty well. if I tell her "We're going to throw away this empty package" she freaks out, but if it just vanishes, she's like "Where's the package? It's gone? But I wanted to keep it!" and we just say "Sorry, it's gone." She just moves on, living in the moment like she always does.