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everyone else in your household too. This is another trick from the Europeans. Though it feels luxurious to have a freshly laundered towel after each shower, it is neither necessary nor does it make your life easier. More towels also mean more storage needed, and more laundry. And all those towels also mean more work: picking up more towels off the floor, adjusting jammed linen closets, and so on.
    Beyond the serene bathroom and less laundry, hanging your towel to dry saves time and money: You’re doing less laundry, using less laundry detergent, and decreasing your electricity use. It’s also better for your back—you’ll have fewer big and heavy baskets of wet towels to carry around the house. So the next time you’re about to pitch a damp towel into the laundry hamper, consider if you could get one more use out of it if you hung it up to dry.
The Rest of the Bathroom
    What else is in your bathroom? Reading material, bath toys, and enough toilet paper to last should there be back-to-back hurricanes for three months? Scale it all back. If you’re really going to read those magazines, take the rack to the living room. Keep only enough bath toys to occupy the kids for twenty minutes. Last, only keep whatever toilet paper you can discreetly and easily store. Instead of jamming forty rolls into a too-small cabinet, try buying smaller packages of toilet paper more frequently. You may end up spending a little more money that way, but it’s well worth it to have a clean, uncluttered bathroom.
Children’s Belongings
    Children are often the source of an abundance of household clutter. It starts with an array of swings, swaddles, and soothers in the baby years, transitions to a pile of plastic toys in the toddler years, and then continues to grow and change as the child becomes a teen—sports equipment, electronics, and on and on. Most parents feel there is no way around it: If you have kids, you have clutter.
    The truth is, a minimalist can beat clutter even with children. Whether you have one newborn or a full household of six children, four cats, and three dogs, it’s possible to beat clutter and live an organized and content life with less stuff. Often parents fall into the trap of thinking that they’ll only get their house back (along with their free time) once the kids move out. There is no need to wait until your final child has been sent off to college to declutter your home. You can start now, no matter the ages or number of children in your home.
    There is no need to wait until your final child has been sent off to college to declutter your home.
    Before you begin decluttering your children’s belongings, think about the ages and temperaments of your children and the chronic clutter areas of your home, and then choose the path of least resistance:
If your children are very young, it will be easiest to declutter without a lot of input from them.
Older children often actually enjoy decluttering their toys and belongings when they are given responsibility and choice. They get to choose what charity to donate the used toys to and they select their favorites that they want to keep for themselves.
Teenagers can often be motivated by incentives such as keeping the cash earned from selling their unused goods.
    No matter how old your kids are, start small. For most families, decluttering can be a shock, and too much too soon can make a child of any age rebel. Be patient and take your time as you get your children to let go of those things they don’t wear or use.
Babies and Preschoolers
    The hard truth about clutter for very young children: it’s actually parent clutter. We think the baby “needs” a big basket of toys, but really, most children under the age of four can be happily amused with pots and pans from the kitchen, a few well-loved books, and other everyday items already in your home. The closets and drawers that are stuffed with new outfits are for you or