Dealing with Clutter in Your House
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How clean do you want your living space to be? I mean, are you fastidious? Does it have to be white glove clean? Or are you a little more looser, a little more creative? I would say my wife and I valued organization and cleanliness. But when kids came along, I said, I'd rather have emotionally healthy kids. I'll trade that in for an unclean house at some level. And

By golly, my kids took me up on the offer. I'm John Fuller, joined by Dr. Danny Huerta, who leads our parenting team. And Danny, how about you? I mean, there's a certain level of clutter that I have accepted and actually embraced as part of this house gets lived in. Yes. Yeah. We have to get to that mindset because it's very hard to keep a house perfectly clean and not sacrifice something.

relationally with our kids. So you do have to give up something, either it's the cleanliness or part of the relationship with the kids. My wife and I wanted our house organized. I mean, that's what we were striving for. It seems like a good goal, yeah. But there were, and we still have loved that and wanted that, but it takes maintenance. It takes a lot of energy. And you have to look at the clutter of your mind

the clutter of your life so that you can declutter your home. Many times it's indecisiveness that creates clutter in the house. And most parents, and in fact, the stats show, John, the statistics show that parents, most parents are at the point of burnout, seven out of 10.

So if a person's at a point of burnout and has to be making constant decisions at home, do we need this? Do we not need that? Usually it gets punted or put into a room.

where it's a four-later room that never gets done. And then that spills out into other places and things don't have a place to go. And so Heather and I have had those conversations in the past. When does the decision need to be made? What do you like to have clean? What is it that is not such a valuable place to have clean? Clutter is a real thing and it can be stressful for kids and for the family.

You've got to be in touch with them. Yeah, yeah. Well, for now, let's go ahead and listen to Focus President Jim Daly from his show, Focus on the Family. Christy Clover was with him, and they talked about how some parents desire a neat home and others, well, not so much. Let me ask that question right up at the front here. We kind of teased that in the opening, but yeah, when is neatness good and neat freak bad?

I think everybody has a clutter threshold. So I think that's the important thing. So everybody has a threshold. Some people can handle more clutter and it does not bother them. Like I am okay with having some piles. I like, I like piles.

Future work to do. Future work to do. Sometimes I'm good at also hiding the piles. But I like piles. My husband grew up in a very neat home. In fact, I remember our first date when we actually were at his parents' house and I needed something from what would typically be a junk drawer in my house. And I opened it and I was like, wow.

my father-in-law does not have a junk drawer. Like, what am I walking into? All the pens had rubber bands around them. Oh, well, they had like a perfect little spot to be and they were pens and pencils and so everything was very nice and neat. And that was not, you know, but that worked for them. And so that was what

worked for her. Now, the interesting dynamic is when you're married and have children is everyone in the family has a different clutter threshold. So as far as what's okay, what's not okay, it kind of depends on how you're communicating as a family. Is your neatness, is your neat freakness, is it impacting others? How would you know?

When you're looking at the others in the family, how do you know, uh-oh? To be self-aware, I guess, is the question. Yeah, to be self-aware. I honestly think it comes down to, are you putting guilt trips on people? Are you making people feel shame? I mean, it's funny that it comes down to that. But like, you know, what are you portraying in your need to have neatness? You said you faked your way through being an organized person. And when you got married, I think it kind of illuminated. It illuminated. So how did you fake your way?

Oh, I now term it as organized clutter. But if there were things that were out, I would just put them in a bin. And if it has a label on it, then it's not clutter, right? So my mess would go into a bin with a label. And now I do realize that it's just delayed clutter. It's still clutter. It's just

put away and tucked away. Behind a door. Behind a door in a garage. It's like garages. Not a garage. It's a garage. About the garage. Yeah. About a garage. About that neat freak thing. I know. That's my neat freak problem. People just throw stuff out there. It's terrible. I know. I know we do. This is not your dump. I know.

But for some of us it is. - Maybe I do have a problem. Okay, you talk about homemaking ADD, I like that. - Yes. - And what does that look like? - Oh, so for me, that looks like if I'm gonna start a project, I'll start it downstairs, and I've learned this about myself, 'cause I've gotten myself in some really sticky situations, that I'll start a project and something in that project will require something from upstairs. So I go upstairs to go and try to grab whatever it is that I need,

only to figure out that there is another project right there. So I'll start that project. And so then I am easily distracted by what needs to get done. And so it's not until I need a project, something from downstairs, that I realize I've got three projects happening all over. Putting dimension to that, like three projects at one time, how long does it take to get project one done that you were distracted from? Is it hours or days or weeks or months? That's a good question. It all depends on how you approach it. And so I approach things differently now.

Because now I'm very much like, when people are like, my whole house is a mess. Where do I start? And so I really try to encourage people, pick one thing. Pick one thing and break it down. Can that one project, like a garage. You're not going to tackle a garage, you know, in one day, typically. So maybe it's a shelf. Maybe it's a bin. Maybe it's a drawer. Or maybe it's a section. I'm getting excited right here. Oh, aren't you? I know. I know. I actually love it. When people, I'll visit a friend and she'll be like, can you help me over here? I'm like, yes, please.

I would love to do that. But yeah, so picking one project and kind of breaking it down to just smaller bites, that's going to make it more doable because what you want to do is have that little euphoric moment of, I did it. And then that helps to bleed into other areas. Yeah, and it keeps you going. It gives you the feel, okay, I did this, I can do that.

Okay, Danny. So some good stuff from Christy. I love her energy and she's got a smile and you just hear that. And so I really appreciate what she was sharing. Earlier, you were talking about making decisions or maybe being frozen a bit by indecision. Mm-hmm.

Recently, we have a crawl space in our home here in Colorado that's a dry crawl space. We don't have water going through it. It's just a spot underneath the main level where we could put things. And boy, did we. 25 years and eight people putting things in that space. And then we found a little bit of mold down there. Oh, wow.

And so the event forced us to pull 25 years and eight people's worth of stuff out of the crawl space and stage it in one spot. And some of it immediately went outside and into the trash and

Others is getting, some of it's getting shredded. I mean, tax returns from 30 years ago. I don't know why we had, we had a full drum kit down there. And so I had my kids cleaning that space out. We're sending pictures to those who don't live in town saying, hey, do you want this? Because like, it's going to get thrown if you don't. And they're like, nope, we don't want it.

So we had a crawlspace full of stuff that most of it went to the dump or to the thrift store. Isn't that interesting? So there are events that can make us declutter. But I'm thinking of the parent who's saying, I just don't know where to start. So what's a good way to get some traction on decluttering absent a flood or some other catastrophic event like we experienced? I would say, first of all, get some rest.

You need to rest before you do this because it's going to take a lot of mental energy to make the decision to get rid of things you're potentially emotionally connected to.

And when you're tired, you usually err on the side of, I'll just deal with that later because of the emotional connection you have to it. So that's first. Just get some rest. Prepare yourself for it. Put a reward at the end of just one room. So I'm going to tackle this one room and the reward may be, maybe that's, hey, let's go out to eat afterwards or I'm going to go take a walk or I'm going to watch a show. Something to have a marker that I accomplished one big goal.

Then you celebrate and you have that pleasure of that. We tend to operate that way as humans. We need that marker and then something to cause us to feel good after something was very stressful. And this can be very stressful for people to declutter, to take that initial move and then take it one room at a time. You don't have to get it all done at once. And someone may want to do that, just get it all done. But to start, start with one room, start with good rest and

enjoy and celebrate the victories of it. And then what you want to do is have a place of the maybes. Because sometimes you can get stuck on the maybe, and then you spend hours or a long time there. Divide out the keeps for sure, the for sure keeps, and the ones that for sure I'm getting rid of. And then the maybes, put it off to the side.

and then regroup and come back to the maybes. And that can help you gain some traction. Yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking about the story you told an episode or two ago about your son and involving him in yardscaping and landscaping. And it feels to me like this is an opportunity as parents for us to slow down and to linger a bit with our kids. Like when my adult kids were overlooking at some of these things, they did pause.

as they got to various books or accomplishments that we had captured. So they didn't just say, oh, I don't want any of it, just throw it all away. So there was opportunity for us to kind of linger and remember and have an emotional moment and then throw it away. So involve your kids now, especially if they're younger, in saying, do you want this?

And don't hold it because they might want it in five years. I made that mistake. And you know what? It didn't turn out the way I thought it might. And John, sometimes we have kids that are more sentimental and they want to keep everything. Yeah.

Help them process the emotional connection they have to certain memories and other ways they could capture those memories other than having to have stuff to capture that. And that can be hard, but it's an important lesson. That's good. Well, that is right on top of the great insights we got from Christy Clover, who talked about clutter and who has the book, M.O.M., Master Organizer of Mayhem.

If you're identifying with the book title or anything that's been said today, get a copy of that book from us here. Make a donation of any amount to the ministry today, either a monthly pledge or a one-time gift, and we'll send that book to you as our way of saying thanks for supporting the ministry and being a partner with us.

And then set aside 10 or 15 minutes of your time and go online to the link we have in the show notes for our free parenting assessment, which addresses connecting with your kids, how you're listening. It really is just kind of a health checkup on your parenting journey with observations about things that are going well and things that, well, might need some improvement.

We all have those areas, and I think you're going to really benefit from this online parenting assessment. The link is in the show notes. Next time, two moms talk about why we all need Jesus in the stress of raising kids. And for now, on behalf of Dr. Danny Huerta, I'm John Fuller, and thanks for listening to the Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast.

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