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If you have been planning to organize the play area in your home, you may have researched a number of toy organization ideas which you are excited to implement. But there may still be a barrier ahead—and that is finding a way to get your small children onboard with the system. You can organize children’s rooms and play areas all you want, but they are only going to stay that way if you can teach your kids to clean up and organize. How do you actually do that?

Obviously how easy or hard it is to teach a kid to clean up is going to vary from one child to the next. Temperament is a major factor, and so is age. Toddlers in general are going to put up the most resistance when it comes to putting things away.

Here are some tips for cleaning with toddlers:

• Especially with young toddlers, do not try to get kids to clean up after themselves every time they make a mess. Just have them clean up and put things away once a day, preferably at the end of the day.

• Do not demand that all toys be put away every day. Children often have multi-day projects and games, and asking them to put them away will only make them belligerent as they will feel you are not respecting their activity. Instead, designate a corner of the room where one or two of these projects will be more or less out of the way.

• Do the work in sections. If you order a toddler to “clean up his room,” that task is both vague and (potentially) enormous. This can be very discouraging, and may actually daunt a kid right out of trying. Instead, pick the most important cleaning and organizing tasks, and give them to your child one at a time. Consider throwing in some kind of reward now and again too for a job well done.

• Make sure the organizing system makes sense. If there are toys which do not have a home, make sure you find them one. Get some more plastic bins for toy storage if you need to. Make sure your child can actually reach and use all the storage solutions. If he or she consistently tries to store toys elsewhere, see if you can modify the solution so your child finds it more intuitive.

• Turn it into a game. Toddlers love to play, so why not turn cleaning up and organizing into a game of some sort? Even if it is just racing to see who finishes first (assuming you are joining in with clean-up efforts, which you frequently should), this can really motivate a kid to get with the program.

Getting children to clean and organize can be a chore in itself, but it is a necessary life skill, and one which you have to teach sooner or later. Over time, it will also mean less work for you around the house. Organizing solutions only work when family members have the organizational skills to use them effectively. That starts in the toy room when your children are small!