Boundaries Make Good Neighbors
By eliminating the boundaries between your kid’s lives and yours, you are just encouraging and teaching them to clutter. Your kids may be the reason you work, but they are not part of the work. Give them their own space. Doing so will teach them boundaries and a sense of organization. It will help them make natural separations with less stress.
Mary had a couple of problems. Behind every good intention, there is a shadow intention. Briefly, our Shadow Self is like a sack of “ought to” we carry around with us. We “ought to” be devoted to our kids. The good intention was to have more time with her daughter. The shadow intention was the fear that she couldn’t balance work and home life any better at home than when she worked in the corporate world.
Her solution seemed to be logical. A clutterer priding herself on being logical is like a baseball pitcher priding himself on his batting ability.
Mary’s situation was difficult, but not unsolvable. By setting up an “office” in Samantha’s room, with places for her crayons, scissors, paper, books, school notebooks, etc., it gave her a sense of her own place. To help her overcome Samantha’s initial feelings of rejection, Mary dropped in to several times a day to see how she was doing for the first few weeks. Samantha began to appreciate having her own space and eventually asked
Mary to “stop interrupting her work.” From the mouths of babes.