How many kids do you know who like to clean? In my house, the answer would be a negative number. Still, it’s gotta be done and you made the mess so clean it up!

Oh, sorry. Flashback…….

Here at home we do our highly successful “5-minute cleanups” – 5 minutes of cleaning and decluttering, no more, no less. You’ll be surprised at just how much can be done in those precious minutes, and just how much energy a kid can expend in such a short burst of time.

The key to making the cleanup work is the use of a timer. Here, we don’t use just any timer, and not one we use on a regular basis (like the microwave timer). No, we use an obnoxiously loud, startling timer. More importantly, the timer does the whole tick-tock thing as it’s winding down, giving us a nice audible cue of the amount of time we’ve passed. Your timer need not be so aggravating/helpful.

The cleanup rules are simple and to the point:

1. Everyone participates. Everyone can devote 5 minutes out of their 1,440 available daily minutes and participate in the group cleanup.
2. No pregame warm-up. There is no need to pre-determine what can or should be done in the alloted cleanup time. In fact, doing so may cause us to feel obligated to one particular task during cleaning time, and if we don’t complete that task it feels undone. I find that jumping in feet first allows us to just go for it with wild abandon.
3. No one sits. All rear ends need to be in motion! Here at home, I sometimes need to expand this to include no kneeling. Some kids tend to slow down the moment any part of them comes to rest on anything!
4. No one stands still (unless the task at hand requires it). Swiping a sink may call for a minute or two of one’s feet making an indentation in the floor, but it’s Hut! 2, 3, 4 after that.
5. Make a difference. Whatever you choose to do during that 5 minutes, make it count for something. If you pick up a book from the floor (a.) pick up all the books and put them away, (b.) pick up everything else from the floor of that room. The point is to complete at least one task instead of small parts of several tasks.

Happy 5-minute cleaning!