Decluttering Kids' Art and Schoolwork
By the time we’ve been adulting for a few years, most of us have found a way to deal with the abundance of paperwork that comes into our lives. Commonplace methods include quickly recycling junk mail; shredding personal paperwork that is no longer needed; filing or digitizing important financial paperwork such as taxes and business papers; and creating archival, “save” bins for mementos from our school and professional lives.
We tend to develop and hone informal systems to quickly identify and store the relatively few items worth saving and purge the rest. Accordingly, many people adopt a “touch it once” policy for incoming paper, whereby items are either immediately processed into the appropriate place, say a desk tray for bills, or dispatched to the recycling bin or shredder.
But there is one category of paper that seems to best even the shrewdest, most efficient paper processors among us: kids’ artwork and school papers.
This category emerges when our kids enter pre-school and grows larger with each passing year. Unlike junk mail, outdated magazines, and boring financial paperwork, our kids’ work is imbued with meaning and sentimentality. And so, our long-standing, functional systems for paper processing begin to fail us.
There’s no way you’re going to recycle your kid’s drawings, collages, and paintings, or shred the super sweet note his teacher wrote when he graduated pre-school. But your current filing system isn’t designed to absorb this type or volume of paper. As such, many people begin to accumulate piles of their kids’ artwork and school papers in random places, creating clutter and the nagging feeling of a job left undone.
Why Kids’ Projects Become Clutter
Until you create a place to store your kids’ work, you can’t put it away. Like anything else, it needs a designated home. Otherwise, it’s doomed to get shuffled from one place to the next creating clutter wherever it goes.
Once you’ve designated a place for kids’ artwork and papers, it takes time to habituate yourself to putting items where they belong. New behaviors require time and practice to become a habit.
Due to the extreme sentimentality of this paper category, paired with an overwhelming volume, parents often suffer from analysis paralysis when it comes to what to keep and what to discard. Logically, you realize you shouldn’t save everything, but where do you draw the line? Faced with this question, many people defer the task for months, or even years.
There’s no “correct” way to deal with this problem. It’s something you must troubleshoot for yourself just like you did with your other paperwork. Most people will gradually begin to try out systems for processing and saving important children’s work and adjust them over time.
A Few Options for Decluttering Your Kids’ Art and Schoolwork
Create a large binder for each new school year and add items chronologically using a three-hole punch.
Purchase and label a plastic storage bin for each year of a child’s life and add items as they arrive home. Note that with multiple children and enough time, the number of bins can become a storage issue.
If you can bring yourself to pare down to one or two file folders per year, you can designate a bin with hanging files labeled with each year.
If you loathe paper or are low on storage space, you can digitize and then discard everything using a traditional scanner or your phone camera paired with an app designed to capture and store paperwork.
There are companies that allow you to ship your kids’ work to them and receive everything back in the form of a beautiful, well-organized memory book.
For prolific creators or oversized items, you can find portfolios at art supply stores or for sale online.
If you want to preserve 3-D arts and crafts projects, consider using large plastic bins or photographing them before discarding.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it gives an idea of how you might start to think about this project. You can be as creative or utilitarian, as low-tech or high-tech as you want to be. The only common denominator is “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Ultimately, it’s up to your personal style when it comes to how to preserve your children’s art and school items.
My personal approach has evolved over time. I started with binders (options #1 above) then graduated to bins (option #2) when the binders were no longer sufficient to hold everything. Then there got to be too many bins to reasonably store, which is where I find myself today.
I’m planning to devote time to paring down the old bins to one or two bins per child containing a few priority items filed by year (option #3). And I would not be surprised if I go completely digital at some point in the future (option #4). Fortunately, I’m generally less sentimental about larger, 3-D projects so I haven’t felt compelled to save those, but I do photograph them.
If you would like someone to help you jump-start this process, a professional home organizer can help you determine a method that would work well for you and get you started on the path to decluttering kids’ arts projects for good.
