We tried minimalism with kids.

It's been said that calling yourself a minimalist is just a fancy way of saying that you're a bachelor. With the amount of stuff that kids need and the path of chaos they leave behind, it's no surprise that people are often skeptical that it's even possible to be a minimalist with kids. But after recently becoming parents, that's exactly what we set out to do. If there is anything that motivates you, it's someone telling you you can't do something. But even when the most famous decluttering expert in the world has admitted to giving up on keeping her home clutter-free with kids, what hope do the rest of us have? Look, can you be a minimalist with kids? No. I guess the old saying might be true. Everyone has a plan until their baby projectile vomits all over your face. Big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. I'll share more on how to build your own minimalist website later. So you learn how much stuff babies need even before they're born. They're really high maintenance. I remember the moment Nat sent me her spreadsheet. It was a list of over 100 items she said we probably needed when Frankie arrived. She asked if I could cut it down. This sounds like a job for a minimalist. I got to work going through each item line by line, thinking about the hypothetical scenarios we might find ourselves in the future, and having conversations with Nat about most of the items on the list. In the end, I realized we probably needed All but two of them. Holy shit! The list included things like a white noise machine, a baby monitor, a change mat, bottles, teats, and binkies, a breast pump and pump parts, a thermometer, nail clippers, clothes, and towels. As we prepared for the birth of our son, it was clear minimalism with kids was going to look much different than we thought it would. We have a lot more stuff now with Frankie, and so that means that organization has become more important than ever. This has kind of become a catch-all bin for some of Frankie's things. We've got some supplies for his baby monitor, a toothbrush. These are baby nail clippers. That wasn't hygienic at all. And we've got a bunch of other stuff in here. Medicine for when he's sick, some Q-tips, the snotty boss, a thermometer, and so on. I think it's safe to say that we've had to get so much more stuff than we ever thought we'd have to. Minimalism with kids. Thoughts? Everyone said it can't be done. It can't be. There is no doubt. Minimalism is harder with a child. There is no doubt. I think that it really tests the strength of your intentions and your mindfulness around wanting to live simply. You have to exercise, I think, more boundaries and you have to be more hardened around them than before. Only a tiny part of the way through our journey as parents, so far I can say that minimalism when you're single is easy. Minimalism with a partner is tricky. Minimalism with kids is like trying not to look like a douchebag in an ice bath. Okay, I feel bad. I don't know who this guy is. I'm sure he's actually a very nice person. How hard is it? Even Marie Kondo, the most well-known tidying expert in the world, has admitted to giving up on her perfectionist level of tidiness. Even the great Marie Kondo can't keep up. With three kids, she said, up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times. I've kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home. I think people with kids love hearing this kind of stuff, especially those who've never even tried minimalism before. They think, aha, I knew it wasn't possible to be a minimalist with kids. But something tells me that Marie Kondo's home is still more organized than yours. Or mine. Maybe she's given up on having a perfectly tidy home, but many of the principles of minimalism still apply to life with kids. Let's bring things back to basics for a minute. The most important message behind Marie Kondo's method and minimalism isn't how to properly fold socks. The core idea is to help you strip away the unnecessary things in your life, leaving behind only the essential and meaningful. That means letting go of the things you no longer need, like the set of golf clubs you haven't touched in six years, and being intentional about each thing you decide to bring into your home. like the 98 new things that you need when your baby is born. Most of the time when people talk about minimalism, they focus on the stuff and how it often gets in the way. But you can also apply these same principles to other areas of your life, including relationships, commitments, and even the apps on your phone. That's why I think it might actually be even more important to be a minimalist once you've had kids. Because once you become a parent, you have less time, less energy, and less money than before. And you have so many things and so many commitments that are competing for your attention. From baby's Pilates and swimming classes to PPTPs and baby bottle warmers. If you want to stay sane, you're going to have to say no to a lot of things. You actually came to me. I was psyched. I was psyched. I was like... This is the most Matt D'Avella solution ever and you're gonna f***ing love me. Nat presented her big idea to me, our son's minimalist wardrobe. Do you know what? I was actually surprised in myself because like... when you have a baby, you want to get all the cute things, right? Like there's like, oh, the cute little socks and the cutest little frilly things. And like, oh my gosh, I can put him in these like knitted suspenders that are like impossible to wash, dry clean only somehow. And I was looking at all that stuff first and I was like, well, what should I like dress him in? I'm like, what should we get? And then I was like, you know what? Fuck it. This kid's getting a capsule wardrobe and he's gonna love it. So we got him like a capsule wardrobe from birth till three months. And literally what that meant was, I think it was like four long sleeve zippies and then like six singlet onesies. That was it. So it was the same color, same style, same design, same brand. all machine washable dryer friendly 100 cotton had mittens built in so you didn't need to buy extra mittens had footsies built in so you didn't need to get extra socks or shoes ridiculous because the amount that they cycle through each day it's just like oh they've spewed on themselves oh they just shut their pants it's like grab it grab it again grab it again new one new one new one and like it was just the same zippy same color and i just love the simplicity that it just took out of one massive part of our life for those first three months where it wasn't like okay, now I need to like somehow wrestle him into these pants that he's gonna throw up in in 20 minutes time. That just helped enormously. Another thing we knew we wanted to address right from the beginning were the toys. So we've got a one bin rule when it comes to Frankie's toys. Basically, as soon as this bin gets filled up. If we want to add a toy, you need to remove a toy. This policy works really well because Frankie can't speak. I'm sure that he won't love this policy when he's a toddler and he can speak for himself, but for now, it's worked really well. Maybe in the future, we'll get a bigger bin for him as he gets a little bit more toys and bigger toys. This really helps us to keep our home as clutter-free as possible. My favorite thing, though, is that out of all of these toys, the one thing that he loves the most is this instruction manual. These were some of the first small ways that we were able to start questioning common assumptions about parenting. Sure, some people probably thought that we were a little crazy dressing him in the same outfit every day for three months straight, or that maybe we were somehow missing out by not dressing him in cute clothes, but we really couldn't care less what other people thought. And for what it's worth, we asked Frankie and he said that he doesn't care either. As Frankie's gotten older and moved through different stages of development, we've had to buy more stuff. The essentials are pretty easy to figure out and don't require much debate. But then there are the nice to haves, those things that we probably could get by without, but might make our lives more convenient or save us time, like using a microwave sterilizer versus boiling a pot of water. These are the things that we almost always talk about before purchasing. So I don't know if we're going to agree on this one, but I'm really curious what non-essential things we bought that you couldn't live without. The cat sheet. This is a hot debate in the house. It looks ridiculous. It's like a tray. It's a massive catching tray that straps onto your high chair once they start eating food. So it catches everything that they drop. Two things. Number one, you've made this amazing omelette for them and they're like, mmm, mmm, mmm. And they'll just drop it on the floor and you're like, alright, great. And it means that you don't have to be on your hands and knees. three times a day just like wiping up the floors. Number two, you can save the food. So it hasn't like dropped on your floor. It's just dropped on this tray that you keep like super, super clean. Literally, it didn't even make it in baby's mouth. He just dropped it like that. I can just. put that back in Tupperware, back in the fridge. He's getting mad next meal and he won't even know better. That's actually like, I think what sold me on the catchy was the fact that you will probably make your money back in a week or two. Think about the amount of avocados that you would go through that he wouldn't eat and just would throw on the floor. That's like one avocado. I mean, it's a banana. What can it cost? $10. So at this point in the video, you might not be buying this whole minimalist with kids thing. So you decide to do what any random stranger on the internet would do. Dedicate your life to proving me wrong. It's so easy to build a professional website that I've personally been using Squarespace for my own sites for the past eight years. It's the perfect platform for solo creators, solopreneurs, and anyone who wants to build a website to ruin my reputation. To get started today, visit squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash Matt D'Avella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. And all jokes aside, please don't make a website that's going to hurt my feelings. Even with all the energy we put into thinking about the things that we brought into our home, we found that stuff can only help so much. Take the SNU, for example. It's basically a very expensive robot bassinet that detects when your baby is crying and rocks them back to sleep. Once you get past the creepiness of a robot holding your baby, it actually sounds like the best invention ever to two sleep-deprived parents. Well, for all the talk about how great the SNU is, It didn't work for Frankie at all. He had trouble sleeping since the very beginning, often waking up between 5 and 15 times every night with and without the snow. For us, I don't think it helped. In saying that, the reason we bought it was because we'd heard amazing things. from so many parents. So like, it's just every baby's different. Every baby's different. And that's the big challenge about buying anything. The biggest thing that's helped Frankie with his sleep is the effort we've put into educating ourselves, learning about different sleep training techniques, and the time spent settling him. Basically, parenting. Let me ask you a question, because like, the way that I was thinking about this was that things didn't significantly make our life easier. Like parenting has been so hard. Would you agree that this stuff made like a 10% improvement on our life? 90% of parenting though, it's just like, it's just doing the work. It's just holding your baby while they're crying for hours. It's just breastfeeding every two to three hours. Stuff helps though, dude. That's what I'm saying. 10%. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stuff helps. 10%. Cause imagine if your baby responded to the snoo. Well then it just flipped to 40%. I know, I know. But what I will say is if we had an avalanche of things, it would have made our life more difficult. Even those early days, if we had like a ton of ridiculous clothes that we had to dry clean or hang dry, we would have lost our freaking minds. Right. Controlling the avalanche of stuff that you want to bring into your home is one thing, but controlling what other people want to bring into your home is another story entirely. One of the trickiest areas to navigate as minimalist parents, gifts. We let most family and friends know that for the time being we weren't doing physical gifts for Frankie. Some understood and some were upset. We've tried not to be smug about it. Like, we're not doing gifts! like suck it like you know like we're like yeah we know it's hard and we know everyone wants to like really show up and like shower the baby with you know love and gifts you know we're hoping it'll be okay to come around and actually spend time with the baby that's really come around and if you could babysit for an hour that would be amazing or like if you could drop off some food like that would be awesome kind of being empathetic for the fact that like you know your friends and family also want a gift and you don't want to like turn them off off and we'll shut them down. It's not like we actually send out a memo to all family and friends. We just have these conversations organically as they come up. But some people won't hear about it and others just don't care. So inevitably we have to figure out what to do with the gifts that we don't need. And this has been our typical approach. If we don't need a gift, we record a video of us throwing it directly into the garbage. Then we send the video to the person who bought it. Okay, we don't actually do that, but to be honest just taking that thing and storing it in the back of a closet because we feel too guilty to get rid of it doesn't feel like a great solution either. So if someone ends up gifting us something that we need like a few towels, we'll obviously keep them. Maybe we'll downsize some old worn-out towels that needed replacing anyway. But if we don't need the gift, let's say it's a swaddle and we've already got six of them in perfectly good shape, we'll usually donate it. Sometimes we hold on to thoughtful gifts because giving it away doesn't feel good to us and we're not complete monsters, but mostly we'd much rather get used from someone else than collect dust in our closet. Do you know what I loved that your family did? So when we got to Philly and they were all meeting Frankie for the first time, your family was so sweet and they threw Frankie a welcome party to the US. And what they had there was they bought a big children's book and every member in the family wrote like a letter, like a note to Frankie on each page from each person in the family. And so that was a keepsake, really small. It's one book we could easily fly back, you know, to Sydney with it. And it was all like, just, you know, filled with these beautiful notes from the family. And I'm like that is amazing like I'm like that was so thoughtful books are something that we are Not gonna be shy about hoarding like we could have 3040 books. It's something that's very easy to donate on Reuse for the second kid. We have donated books too, which was really nice But obviously it's like you have to set those kind of guidelines You really have to have those conversations up front because if you don't then you're just gonna get overwhelmed with gifts I think the biggest challenge we've realized is just how quickly kids grow and how quickly you need to buy new things as a result of that. Clothes last three to six months, bottles get replaced with sippy cups, toys get swapped out with each stage of development, and you need to save all of it if you plan on having a second or third kid. Hence why we have these. These are storage bags that we keep under our bed with all of the things that we'll need if we have a second kid. And I say if because... We thought we wanted a second kid, but my God, is it hard? Like, holy shit. Now we'll have a second kid, I think. Feeding solids is pretty new for us. And so we've had to buy a whole bunch of new things and we've had to figure out how to store and organize all of it. This used to be a cleaning supplies closet, but now it's where we store all the things for his solids. I actually installed three new shelves here and got a bunch of organizational bins to keep everything nice and tidy. We've got our microwave sterilizer and breast pump bags, some of Frankie's snacks here, as well as a really cool allergen starter pack that has come in handy. Down here we've got all of his silicone plates, cups, and bowls. I really like these storage bins because you can pull them out and pick out everything that you need. Obviously, these are very beautiful minimalist products. You don't have to get this stuff to be a minimalist, but we think that they look nice. I did find these jars lying around the house, which has helped to organize our spoons and forks a little bit easier. And down here we've got lunch boxes as well as our breast pump parts and our bottles. I think this is probably one of the most overwhelming things about trying to be a minimalist with kids. It's the constant organizing and reorganizing, the constant questioning, do we need this? Do we need that? What are we gonna need in one month's time? How about when he starts daycare? What do we do with all this stuff when we're done with it? It's enough to drive you crazy. I understand why some parents don't wanna pursue minimalism with kids. I've learned enough about parenting over the past year to know that it often feels impossible. I mean, I was so deliriously tired in the first few weeks after Frankie was born that I was literally sprinting to the grocery store to save time. What? We are parents. This happened. Oh my god. Actually, you look less than me. There are nights, weeks, and months where you only have the energy to curl up into a ball and pray that your baby stays asleep. And the last thing you need is to feel guilty about having a cluttered pantry. So if you find yourself in these moments, I think the most important thing you can let go of is the feeling that your life needs to look perfect. Minimalism isn't just about the stuff. As I mentioned earlier, it can also be applied to things like our commitments and relationships. And one area that I've really started to scale back since Frankie was born is my work. The closer that we got to Frankie's due date, the more I knew I needed to simplify things. Don't get me wrong, I've still been a minimalist all this time since I first learned about it 10 years ago, but I realized over the past few years that my work's gotten much more complicated and much more stressful. Last year, I was leading a team of five, had more obligations and meetings than I wanted, and I found myself less excited about my work. My life was cluttered with emails, calls, problems, obligations, deadlines, and meetings. Adding a baby into the mix just felt impossible, so I started to scale back. There were other motivating decisions that I talked about in my last video, but I really tried to remove as much from my plate as I could, and after years of leading a small team, I decided to become a solo creator again. And that meant saying no to a lot of things. Things like conferences, work trips. 99% of brand deals, virtually all interviews, making extra videos, creating new courses, meetings, networking calls, and emails. Before having Frankie, I couldn't imagine cutting all these things out of my life. My work was my life, but all that changed. There were things that I had been doing for so long that I had convinced myself that I had to keep doing them. And it was only through questioning my assumptions about what was truly essential, what truly brought me joy, what parts of my work I actually was fulfilled by, was I able to kind of... put together a new path forward. And as I started letting go, it made more time for family. It allowed me to help Nat as she recovered from the birth. I was less anxious and stressed than I otherwise would have been. And I got to have true quality time with Frankie that I knew would slip away if I... wasn't truly present in the moment. Going forward, there's one thing that I ask myself before making a purchase or signing on to a new commitment, and it's, is this going to make my life more complicated? There are so many experiences and opportunities and pieces of gear that I would love to bring into my life, but I know that many of these things would make my life more complicated. And in this chapter that I'm currently in, I'm focusing on keeping things simple. I'm focusing on the essential. And so if it's going to make my life more complicated, then it's a no. We can only talk right now on our experience over the past. eight months of having a baby and obviously it's going to change a lot when we have a second child and when we have toddlers i can hear i can hear the parents who are watching this of like kids of toddlers being like yeah i'd love to see your five toys with a two-year-old and you're like okay yeah we know we haven't been there yet um but people say the same thing with babies too obviously our life's going to change we're going to have to come up with new rules and figure out how to communicate these messages and lessons to children and they're not gonna like them I'm sure but it's like as parents I think you have to set boundaries with your children and he's awake. So if you're looking to start practicing minimalism for the first time with kids or if you've got a little one on the way I'd say go for it. Just don't be too hard on yourself if things don't look exactly how you expect them to. Sometimes you have to forget about the perfect cookie cutter minimalist aesthetic and just give way to the chaos.

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Here's Nat's spreadsheet all cleaned up with links (Some are affiliate links. All are genuine recommendations): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jyH_VCv4jmnTLlmGFV5kG9J5tEVIsgo5wC2eE58rxts/edit?usp=sharing

Hope this helps! :)

Hi there 👋 If you're new to my videos my name is Matt D'Avella.

I'm a documentary filmmaker and YouTuber. I've made a couple films for Netflix (Minimalism & The Minimalists) and I teach a course on how to build your own YouTube channel from scratch. If you like to learn about self-development as much as I do, subscribe for more videos.

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