Keeping your car clean when you have kids can be a daunting task. As much as you love having your little ones with you on the go, their presence in the car often means more dirt, crumbs, and toys. It’s important to maintain a clean car not only for aesthetic reasons but also for health and safety reasons.
With a few simple guidelines in mind, you can ensure your car remains clean and tidy, even with kids in tow. In this post, we’ll share four tips for keeping your car clean when you have kids.
4 Guidelines For Ensuring Your Car Remains Clean When You Have Kids
Prevent having food in the vehicle.
This is surely easier to say than implement, however, you should definitely try. Even though you may need to have your kids eat in the vehicle while you’re rushing from home to school or some extracurricular activity, it is best to curb eating in the vehicle as much as you can. If you can’t avoid eating in the car, then make sure that you always have a garbage bag to hold the wrappers and any rubbish in the vehicle.
Use car mats to cover the floor of your car, they are much easier to remove and clean than the carpet itself. Just about every parent I know has crumbs and wrappers in their car seats and in hidden crevices. It is almost impossible to get away from this issue, however, you should reduce it by ensuring there is always a garbage bag in the car for your kids to place their refuse and empty packs in. Once you get your kids accustomed to properly disposing of their garbage, this will become an excellent habit.
Once you reach home, empty the garbage bag.
Even if you likely spend most of your time exiting the car while handling your own bags, kids bags, phone, keys etc, you should avoid leaving the garbage bag in the car until the next day. This can easily cause it to be left in there for days or even weeks! Thankfully, once all of the garbage is in the bag, it is easy to take it out and throw it in the bin. This is much easier to handle than having to clean your car and pick out weeks old banana skins, hard to reach crumbs etc.
Reduce the number of toys in the car.
Kids have a tendency to take their toys with them wherever they go and this includes into the car. Even if they didn’t bring toys into the car, they may go to parties, receive party bags and open them in the car and all the toys and snacks would get strewn throughout it.
When kids have toys in the cars, it can be very distressing and distracting for you as a driver since it is quite hard to concentrate when you’re being beaten with a toy hammer or a kid is hurling toy figurines. So, it is best to keep the toys out of the car and keep your kids occupied with other games.
Get your kids involved in cleaning.
When kids are young, they won’t see cleaning as a chore as yet. So, make sure that you get them to help you clean while having lots of fun. This can be done on a weekly or monthly basis. While they’re having fun playing with the foam, you can check your oil and tyres.
