Teaching kids about cause and effect

My girls, aged six and three, have to clean up the living room every night before they go to bed. This is a rule I started not too long ago, after finding myself spending quite a few minutes picking up stray ribbons, scraps of paper, endless stationery and food bits off the sofa and carpet every night, minutes I could have spent playing Bubble Pop on my phone.

So, now they have to clean up their own mess, which is fair considering they have taken over the living room anyway, and the TV. This is what happens every night: Once they’ve watched their last show on TV, they will very discreetly scurry upstairs, until I notice I haven’t heard their voices for a while. When I ask for them, they’d shout and tell me they’re in bed already. No can do. So down they trudge, and very unwillingly start to tidy their area.

Don’t think I have it easy either; I have to stand there and direct everything. Whose pencil is that? Who made the 300 paper airplanes and left them all over the place?

The way they drag their feet, you would think they have been performing back-breaking labour the whole day and I’m making them do more.

After about five minutes of tidying, there would still be the errant eraser or scissors lying around, at which point I’d pull out the go-in-the-bin card. Whatever hasn’t been claimed or put away would now go in the rubbish bin.

Sure enough, tiny hands would grab their belongings and stuff them into a drawer. I could probably still use that trick for a couple more years.

This rule is win-win. I have a tidy house, and my kids actually think twice now before turning the living room upside down, because they’re the ones who are going to have to clean it.

It’s a real bonus when they sometimes bound up after I come back from work and show me that they’ve tidied up the coffee table, with bright beaming smiles.

There are off days of course, when I see more paper scraps than floor, like the time they discovered they can make their own paper streamers. Or when they go through their carton phase, and every carton in the house is turned into a phone, laptop, TV or oven.

When we first moved into the house, I envisioned an area just for them, where they could make as much mess as they wanted, and the rest of the house would be untouched. Well, for one thing, my house ain’t big enough, and for another, kids are professional space invaders. They simply permeate any space with their things. It’s like a natural talent.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in one of those cartoons where the kids run around the house pulling everything out from the cupboards, and I’m zooming after them, picking things up and putting them back in. If that cartoon hasn’t been made, I call the copyright and intellectual property on it.

Maybe it’s my fault. I buy them too many things, something I have also stopped doing not too long ago. Why am I teaching them a lifestyle of excess when I should be showing them how to take care of their belongings?

It’s just parenting common sense; when they only have one set of Lego to play with, instead of 10, they’ll pay more attention to the set they have.

So now my kids play with paper and cartons and paint. They make and invent things. On the days that I get tired of nagging them to pick up after themselves, I get them out of the house and into the little garden patch I have.

Here they can muck around in the dirt and help me with my compost pile. Some of their paper scraps go into the compost, as well as the fruit peels from their afternoon snack.

Cause and effect is something that kids learn by instinct. Create a mess, you have to tidy up. When you put peels into the ground, it feeds the plants, and reduces waste. It’s my version of show and tell, only I’d rather show than tell.