Toy Jail: Where The Bad Toys Go
What to do when you don't want to pick up another toy off the floor
Are you ready to never have to pick up the same toy off the floor twice in the same day?
Allow me to introduce you to Toy Jail.
I created1 Toy Jail a few years ago: it’s a basket on top of the fridge where (offending/offensive) toys go if I see them on the floor in our main living area.
I don’t send toys that are regularly played with: loveys and Legos are mostly exempt. Instead, I target toys I think are dumb, or toys I think my kids don’t even find precious.
Toy Jail serves four main purposes:
It helps me “hide” clutter by moving it from the ground to a place above eye level.
It teaches my children that there are consequences for not putting their things away.
It reduces the amount of nagging.
It reveals which toys we actually care about.
Mostly, it helps me feel less resentful towards my children for not always putting away their stuff.
I don’t want to want to pick up after them, but I also don’t want to see the thing over and over again.
In order to retrieve a toy from Toy Jail (let’s call this Toy Bail ;)), my kids have to pay tokens. If they can request the missing toy by name, it costs two tokens to bail it out. If they don’t even know what they are looking for, it costs two tokens just to see what’s missing, and 1-2 subsequent tokens for each toy.
How we earn tokens is a topic for another post, but if you want to implement Toy Jail and don’t already have a token system in place, you could, for example, ask your child to put away 10 things in the house to bail out one toy from jail.
Toy Jail also helps us determine toys that are not as well loved, which helps support us when it’s time to declutter. When my kids want to buy something new (or new to them), I have them get rid of 10 things for each new item they want. Toy Jail provides a great place to search for things that are ready to go.
Do you have a system like Toy Jail? How do you deal with kids who have difficulty putting their toys away? I’d love to hear about it!
Junk Drawer (formerly “Closing Randomness”)
Toy Jail evolved from “Toy Hospital”—a concept likely familiar to many moms of toddlers: the place where toys that are not balls go to “heal” when they are thrown.
That's hilarious, well done!
Genius!!