- I'm a mom of two girls, and I let my kids be kids in every room of the house.
- They set up their toys to play wherever they want.
A pristine house doesn't rank at the top of my priorities as a parent. Topping my list are my kids, not double dipping, and maybe not feeling so personally threatened by the thought of eating a vegetable.
There is messy, incriminating evidence of child-rearing in my house, and I'm largely OK with it. But I can understand the underlying sentiment from other parents who feel strongly about a tidy house.
I'm an outlier among my immediate group of friends, whose immaculate homes have clearly enforced no-fly zones when it comes to toys and other things. But I find comfort among other parents who preemptively put their not-pristine houses out there. Messy is good, stop wondering where our Swiffers are and don't judge.
My house is clean, but toys are everywhere
I promise that my house isn't a biohazard situation. I am on it when it comes to constant crumb surveillance, and I dutifully uphold the sanctity of accent pillows. But I otherwise let my kids be kids everywhere.
Many of their toys are housed in a designated room, but throughout the rest of the house, you may — literally — stumble upon ratty doll heads, abandoned drawings, many fidget toys, and other stuff.
My kids know I won't object if they have an impromptu stuffed-animal tea party in the dining room. You might see a puzzle project sitting out in the living room that won't immediately be put away.
I like to acknowledge and reward their creativity.
When my kids spend hours putting together a vet clinic or constructing a farm out of cardboard, paint, and water bottles, that kind of dedicated effort and imagination shouldn't be immediately dismantled at the end of the day in the name of tidiness. We could banish their stuff to the basement or order them to leave all their toys in their rooms upstairs. But the truth of the matter is that I prefer to have my kids close and their things closer.
I get front-row seats to their creativity
Messy means something.
It's a bit like a National Geographic-type observation, but I like watching my kids in — what I like to call — their natural habitat. I get to see and hear them play in a more organic way. I love hearing my kids' conversations with each other, to their stuffed animals, or to themselves.
It's heartening to watch how they study a book about raccoons, or the way they devote painstaking precision to a popsicle-stick craft.
And I like to be reminded of their presence and the fact that they are just kids. I have to remind myself that these are the days. This is it, the exhausting, elbow-deep, snack-gophering, face-wiping thick of it — and it will be over sooner than I realize.
As a parent, I sometimes seem to be sprinting from each stage to the next — complaining about and converting the vestiges of childhood in the same breath. I complain about how much space the high chair takes up, and then I start eyeing how to convert the backyard once the kids outgrow the swing set.
I don't use growth charts, shoe sizes, and their expanding vocabulary as the only metrics of my kids' growth. The business of raising them is just as evident in the clutter and the chaos we parents shouldn't be so quick to put away.