Decluttering with a VERY reluctant 4 year old...

[BellaGoth]

Any tips?

DS is 4 and seems to have inherited my mum's hoarding tenancies! His room is so full we can hardly get in it any more so something needs to be done. He won't even through out a kinder egg capsule if he can avoid it so I'm really struggling. He has board books he never reads, peg puzzles, even a Sophie Giraffe he refuses to part with.

He is currently seeing a paediatrician / SALT for some sort of Social Communication Disorder, possibly High Functioning Autism, could this be a factor?

I've tried offering to buy things off of him for his baby sister (limited success).

Any ideas?

My children are also like this, it's a nightmare, and you should clamp down now if you can. Mine are much older and it's becoming a real problem, 8yo DS in particular, as he only has a smallish room. He becomes distraught when he cannot find things though, so very difficult to get rid serruptitiously. He remembers everything as he has an eidetic memory.

Take a peek at the grown up hoarders' threads on MN. Notice their distress, sometimes it destroys careers and families. Then make sure you teach him to let go, and that stuff is just stuff.

Paxillin, do you know whether there is a good approach for that with kids with autism? It seems to me that hoarding can be an anxiety thing and that is often a feature of ASD. But tackling hoarding the wrong way could actually make it worse, by creating a fear that it's all going to get taken away?

Well, since the room won't grow it WILL be randomly taken away unless the DS can get used to giving stuff up or OP introduces a blanket ban on any new toy coming in, leaving her pre-teen with baby stackers when the time comes.

hole I'm an only child, don't even have cousins on my mum's side! Which means I'll have to deal with her hoard AND my aunt's one day...

output I agree completely, DS is such a worrier, bless him!