How do you get your child to tidy up?
There are three global challenges that I fear will not be solved in my lifetime: the Middle East conflict, global warming and the chaos in my daughter's room. I recently had the honour of interviewing a woman who claims to have the third problem under control. She is Marie Kondo from Japan.
In her organising manifesto - the world's best-selling book of recent years - she focuses on three rules: Every thing in your home has its fixed place. Only keep things that really make you happy. Throw everything else away. This laconic sorting logic fits in perfectly with the reductionist trend of urban city dwellers, whose austere living spaces are reminiscent of the immaculate tidiness of hotel rooms.
The Japanese hermeneutics of order also made sense to me immediately. And yet questions arise: Does Kondo have children? In other words, does she know what she is talking about? Has her method ever been tested on real children's rooms? Her astonishing answer: children love order.
How long does the condo order last?
53 minutes after the interview, I was sitting in the mess room with my daughter. As I had learnt from Kondo, we poured all the clothes, books, toys, glue, crayons, cuddly toys, chewing gum wrappers, children's postmarks, glass marbles and doll nappies into a big pile.
For the next 12 hours, she picked up every single thing and asked herself if it made her happy. Behind her back, I threw half of it away. Behind my back, she picked most of it out of the rubbish bag again. But 36 hours and six rubbish bags later, the room was almost empty, the clothes were meticulously folded in the wardrobe and every, really every toy was in its permanent place.
Our daughter shows good friends her "condoised"room as if it were the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
We lay in each other's arms like after a big match. In bed at night, she proudly wrote letters to her grandmother (a person with an obsessive sense of order) and explained the new principle to her dolls with a stern face. I opened a beer and made bets with my wife as to when chaos would return (she: after two days, I: after two hours).
The experiment is now a few months old, our flat is sinking into disorder, but every evening our daughter tidies her room as reliably as an atomic clock, folds her clothes and tells everyone about her «condoised» room with the insistence of a hoover salesman.
Really good friends even invite her to their homes to show off the room as if it were Pharaoh Tutankhamun's burial chamber. There are two global challenges that I fear will not be solved by humanity in my lifetime: the Middle East conflict and global warming.
