As a parent, it always creates a dilemma in your heart and mind as your child is not only your flesh and blood but also a huge part of your existence. 

When a child is growing up, a mother of course also goes through a crisis. When they used to decide and dictate their choices and how the tables have turned so quickly! I would like to call it a journey of Motherhood because after a certain age a child becomes an adult however ‘once a mother always a mother’. 

So I feel before asking the child how much this piece of art matters to him/her we got to ask ourselves(mothers) whether we are ready to let them off our fingers. The journey of motherhood brings with it a lot of clutter. Believe it or not, I still have the first set of shoes I bought for my son and he is ten years now. Funnily for him it hardly matters how often I am donating his clothes, notebooks, first drawing papers and craft, nursery alphabet copies, first uniform and the list goes endless. So I feel more than the kids, mothers require to ask themselves whether we are ready to throw the gamut of memories collected in a piece of paper!

As time passes in leaps and bounds, it only seems realistic to slowly get rid of the kid’s stuff whether it is their first papercraft or their first scribbling. Thanks to social media, there are loads of sites and you can connect with people who can collect these items from your doorstep and deliver it to an orphanage or a child care center where your kids’ memory will also be preserved and utilized also.

My husband is in a transferable job and more often than not, loads of items get discarded while packing and unpacking as well. However, it is always advisable to make the kids take a note as to the items we are planning to discard otherwise sometimes children may feel sentimental about the whole decluttering business. In fact, it would be great to ask their opinion about the concept of charity and would they like to give away some of their stuff. In such a process a child feels respected and the mother won’t have to die in guilt that how insensitive she has been in the entire ball game.

The environment is going through massive changes and now global warming is not unknown to anyone. Hence its high time now when children should themselves learn to donate items related to art which can not only quench their thirst of inventing something new but also, they feel happy by the joy of giving. In fact, now it is all the more parent’s duty to explain and judge the need of the item they are planning to buy so that the cluttering doesn’t happen in the first place. Children are quite intelligent and I am sure that with a little bit of cajoling they will surely contribute to acting intelligently as well. Greta Thunberg is one of the brightest examples.

In a world of abundance where both parents work most of the time, we indulge in buying a lot of unnecessary stuff that will help culminate our child into great masters of the future. We all parents are guilty of indulging our children by fulfilling all their demands.

As adults let’s start investing in things that are immune to age and time and if that’s not possible, let’s start researching who all can use the stuff after the need of my child gets over so that I can carefully donate or sell that item. In that way, I am not only decluttering my own house but also creating less waste for mother Earth. In the near future, I am hoping that with such endeavors we won’t have to ‘throw’ our child’s artifacts but simply give them away for utility purposes.