I never thought I’d find myself evangelizing about minimalism to a group of exhausted parents at a PTA meeting, but there I was, gesturing wildly about storage solutions while someone’s four-year-old used my leg as a climbing frame. The funny thing is, five years ago, I would’ve laughed in your face if you’d suggested I’d become “one of those minimalist types.” With two kids, a dog that sheds enough fur to create a whole new dog weekly, and a partner who collects vintage video game consoles, minimalism seemed about as achievable as getting everyone to bed on time without negotiations worthy of the United Nations.
My journey started after tripping over a plastic dinosaur at 2 AM while carrying a feverish toddler to the bathroom. As I hopped around in silent agony (because waking the baby would’ve been worse than my possibly broken toe), I had a moment of clarity: our house wasn’t working for us. We weren’t messy people—we were just drowning in stuff.
The next morning, with my toe throbbing as a reminder, I started researching solutions. Most minimalist blogs made me want to scream. They featured serene white spaces with perhaps a single carefully placed succulent—clearly the homes of people who didn’t have children who considered finger painting the walls a legitimate art form. Or they suggested impractical approaches like “touch each item and see if it sparks joy” (try that with the 3,427 LEGO pieces scattered across your carpet).
What I needed wasn’t aesthetic minimalism but functional minimalism—systems that would work even when life got chaotic, which, with young children, is approximately 97% of the time.
I started small, in the kitchen. We had drawers so stuffed with utensils that opening them required physical strength. Did we really need four potato mashers? (Why did we even have four? It remains a mystery.) Three can openers? Seventeen mismatched plastic cups from various restaurants? I ruthlessly pared down to what we actually used, not what we might theoretically use in some imagined future where I suddenly become the sort of person who makes soufflés.
The impact was immediate and surprising. Making dinner became less stressful because I could find things without excavating through layers of kitchen debris. Cleanup was faster. And—this was unexpected—my kids actually started helping more because the simplified systems were easier for them to understand and manage.
This small success gave me courage to tackle other areas, always with one principle in mind: our version of minimalism had to support our actual life, not some Instagram-worthy fantasy.
For toys (oh god, the toys), I created a rotation system. About 70% of the toys stayed in labeled bins in the garage, while 30% were available at any given time. Every few weeks, we’d swap some out. The brilliant part? The kids treated the returning toys like new gifts, playing with them intensely rather than ignoring them in a corner. Plus, they never noticed when certain especially annoying toys (looking at you, recorder flute from Aunty Jean) mysteriously failed to make it back into rotation.
The clothing situation was next. My daughter had fifty-seven hair accessories yet somehow always left the house looking like she’d been styled by a hurricane. My son had twenty-seven t-shirts but wore the same three with various dinosaurs on them until they practically disintegrated. I reduced their wardrobes to practical amounts, organized in ways they could manage themselves.
Did they suddenly become self-sufficient, stylishly dressed angels? Absolutely not. But getting ready for school evolved from a forty-minute battle to a fifteen-minute minor skirmish. I’ll take that victory any day.
Paper was my nemesis—the permission slips, the bills, the artwork, the junk mail, the mysterious forms that needed signing yesterday. I created a single processing station with a shredder, recycling bin, and simple filing system. Everything got handled once—immediately into the bin, the file, or the action folder. No more archaeological layers of paper on every surface.
The entryway nearly broke me. Our front hall looked like a sporting goods shop that had been hit by a tornado. Shoes, backpacks, hats, umbrellas, random socks (why always just one?), and sports equipment reproduced there nightly. I installed individual hooks at kid height, bins for shoes, and a strict “if it comes in, it has a home or it leaves again” policy. It wasn’t perfect—nothing with children ever is—but it improved from “total disaster” to “controlled chaos,” which felt like winning the lottery.
Now, I’m not going to lie and say our house looks like a minimalist paradise. It doesn’t. There are LEGO constructions occupying the coffee table for days, art projects drying on kitchen counters, and the occasional sock that somehow migrates to bizarre locations (how did it get on top of the refrigerator?). But the difference is that these are active, purposeful messes—evidence of life being lived—not the overwhelming, soul-crushing accumulation of unused, unneeded stuff.
The biggest change has been mental. I no longer feel like our possessions are silently judging me, demanding to be organized, cleaned, or put away. The kids don’t get overwhelmed choosing from too many options. We spend less time managing our stuff and more time doing things together.
And you know what? The “stuff management” skills have transferred to other areas of our lives. We’re better at saying no to overscheduling, at choosing quality experiences over quantity, at recognizing when enough is enough.
If you’re reading this while surrounded by evidence that small humans have taken over your formerly adult home, here are the practical strategies that actually worked for us:
First, be ruthlessly honest about your actual life, not your ideal life. I had beautiful scrapbooking supplies gathering dust because in my fantasy life, I spent peaceful evenings preserving memories. In reality, after the kids were in bed, I collapsed on the sofa watching baking shows. Once I accepted this truth, those supplies could go.
Second, create systems so simple that they work when you’re operating on four hours of sleep with a chorus of “Mum! Mum! Mummy! Ma! MAAAAA!” in the background. The perfect organization system that requires seventeen steps will fail. A “good enough” system that can be maintained during chaos will succeed.
Third, make storage accessible to everyone, including the shortest members of your household. My five-year-old can’t reach the top shelf, but he can put his toys in a bin on the floor. Storage that doesn’t match your family’s capabilities creates frustration, not function.
Fourth, embrace the one-touch rule. When something enters your home—mail, school notices, new purchases—deal with it immediately. File it, use it, or bin it. Things that sit in “I’ll deal with this later” piles become permanent features of your landscape.
Fifth, recognize that minimalism with children is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. Their needs change constantly. The baby equipment gets replaced by toddler gear, which gives way to school supplies, which eventually becomes sports equipment and tech gadgets. Be flexible and adjust as needed.
Lastly, and most importantly, remember that functional minimalism is about supporting your family’s wellbeing, not achieving some arbitrary standard of spareness. If the elaborate Playmobil village that’s taken over your dining room brings hours of creative play, that’s not clutter—it’s childhood happening right before your eyes.
Sometimes I catch myself looking around our home and feeling a twinge of comparison when I see those serene minimalist interiors on Pinterest. But then my son will come bounding in, trailing a cape made from my good tea towel, chattering about the fort he’s building in the living room, and I remember: this season of life is gloriously, chaotically full. Our version of minimalism isn’t about emptiness—it’s about making space for what matters.
And right now, what matters is finding that missing puzzle piece before the four-year-old notices it’s gone, helping with homework at a table we can actually see the surface of, and having less stress and more joy in our everyday routines. It’s not perfect, it’s not always pretty, but it works for us. And in a household with young children, anything that genuinely works feels like nothing short of magic.
