Come on, Marie Kondo. Leave the kids out of this

With Marie Kondo set to launch a children’s tidying up book, you have to wonder, does she really think she can get three-year-olds to put their toys away? I’d like to see her give it a try, writes Darren Levin.

According to Marie Kondo’s now infamous KonMari method of sorting the junk you’ve accumulated over the years, you should only keep things that “spark joy”.

Do your kids spark joy?

I asked myself this question the other day when our twins decided to empty out their entire wardrobe onto the floor of their bedroom, leaving it looking like the footpath outside a St Vinnies on a Sunday afternoon.

I imagined how much extra joy they’d spark if they folded their tiny Emma Wiggle pyjamas into origami-like cylinders each night before bedtime. Or threw out their 2017 collection of footy cards. Or tipped their Coles Little Shop minis, Disney tiles and Fresh Stikeez into the non-recyclable trash and embarked on a minimalist lifestyle while their collectibles spent the next 1000 years decomposing in landfill. Oh, the joy that would spark.

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But kids don’t like tidying. In fact, they’re the ultimate hoarders, ascribing sentimental meaning and attachment to toys they lost interest in as soon as they came out of the box.

The queen of tidying up is coming for our kids. Picture: Netflix

We learnt this the hard way when we tried to arrange a cleaning bee at our home one afternoon.

On one side of the room, we created a keep pile. On the other side, a chuck pile. In the middle, our patience and sanity.

“How can you make me choose like this Dad?” sobbed our daughter when I told her she had to decide between a limbless Spider-Man and a Barbie with texta all over it face and its hair chopped off.

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For the rest of the week, they stealthily dragged toy after toy from the nature strip back into our home. I even caught one of them fishing a frayed $2 shop teddy bear with a missing ear out of the bin when they thought we weren’t looking. At times it actually felt as though we were on the TV show Hoarders, minus a few decomposing cats, soiled mattresses, and final warning eviction notices.

It’s because of this experience that I’m not fully convinced by Marie Kondo’s recent attempt to Kon children into a life of decluttered order via an illustrated book aimed at three to seven-year-olds.

Vanessa Pearson with her three-year-old daughter, Imogen practising the Marie Kondo method. Picture: AAP/Sarah Marshall

Kiki & Jax: The Life-Changing Magic Of Friendship — a twist on Kondo’s bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up — tells the story of two mates from different sides of the cleaning tracks.

Jax is a “sorter” while Kiki is a “collector”, which is just a nice way of saying Kiki is a “dirty hoarder that can’t explain why they’ve got two copies of Frampton Comes Alive on vinyl and an opened box of Fleer basketball cards from 1994”. (That sounds like an extremely specific reference, but I swear I am speaking generally.)

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Anyway, these two friends somehow have a lot of fun together, but their friendship unravels when — wait for it — “things start to get in the way”. The book isn’t out until November, but I can only assume that those “things” are physical objects, and that they don’t spark joy, so Kiki and Jax decide to spend an emotional afternoon at the rubbish tip throwing out Peter Frampton records and crying uncontrollably into the void.

“I hope that the characters of Kiki & Jax will inspire children and families to tidy and embrace joy,” Kondo told her fans on social media.

And you know what? I hope so, too. Because if Kiki and Jax can’t teach kids the transformative power of packing toys into purpose-built boxes or pancake-ifying their clothes, then I’ve officially given up on them ever having tidy rooms.

Darren Levin is a columnist for RendezView. @darren_levin