Disclosure: Consideration has been provided for publishing this article. I thought it was perfect timing to discuss keeping your home clean as we start back to school! 

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You love your kids, and you love your home. You just wish that your kids loved your home the way you do. If they did, they might take better care of it. Kids are dirt factories. They also don’t pick up their things. Here are four tips for keeping your home clean when you have kids.

Have a Door Policy

Image via Flickr by WillowGardeners

As a parent, you’re painfully aware of the way your children’s shoes look. They’re monuments to misadventures in the muddiest parts of town. You can’t do a lot about the smell of the shoes, but you can stop the incursion of unclean substances.

Start a door policy.

Tell your kids that your home is a shoeless environment. The instant the children enter the home, you expect them to take off their shoes and leave them by the door. With this strategy, you’ll limit the amount of dirt your kids bring into the home. Plus, it’s the healthy thing to do.

The Quick Wipe-Down

Many parents feel like they lack the free time to do a lot of cleaning. Parenting is a full-time job, yet most parents also hold full-time jobs outside of the home. That means you’re working all the time and don’t want to clean.

What you may not realize is how much you can do in only a few minutes. Try an experiment. Grab a clean cloth and wipe down the area around your sink and oven. How long did it take? The answer is a couple of minutes. Try to do this quick wipe-down a couple of times each week, and your home will look and feel cleaner.

Eat Then Bathe

One of the best ways to keep your home clean is to have a routine. You want to train your kids about how they should organize their days. As they grow older, they’ll hopefully learn to organize their stuff as well. That step is a work in progress over the next decade, though. For now, the important thing is that you teach your kids a set routine.

The best routine is to bathe your kids immediately after dinner. Don’t worry about the myth that a bath impacts digestion. The human body is tougher than that. The dirt that covers your children is also tough. You want to get rid of it quickly. By having your children take a bath after eating, you’ll have a cutoff time for their poor hygiene each evening. Also, sending them to bed when they’re clean will keep their bed linens fresher.

Add an Air Purifier

If your kids are going to track dirt everywhere they go, you might as well accept dirt as a fact of life. However, you can battle contaminants that might sneak their way into your home’s air as your kids go about their messy activities.

Your best bet is to add an air purifier. If you buy a large one, a trusted service like Conditioning Air Mechanical HVAC Services can do the installation. Alternatively, you install a small one on your own. This device will improve the indoor air quality of your home, cutting back on substances that can aggravate allergies or cause odors.

You can take control of the cleanliness of your home. Simply follow the four tips listed here.