Do You Let Kids Decorate Your Home? What I Learned As A Parent + Simple Practical Tips
I fumbled through my front door last March, arms crammed full of grocery bags, a half-melted pint of ice cream dripping down my wrist, and the house was dead quiet. That’s always the first sign of trouble with my 7-year-old Lila and 4-year-old Jax. Before I could set the bags down, they both jumped out from behind the couch yelling “SURPRISE!” and flipped on the kitchen light. The entire front of our refrigerator was crisscrossed with neon washi tape, layered into three overlapping rainbows. Cut-out construction paper dinosaurs were taped head-to-toe along the entryway wall, and pom poms were stuck to the base of our gray couch like weird fuzzy warts. I’d painted that entry wall just six weeks before, a soft warm off-white I’d spent three weekends picking out. My first gut reaction was a tight little flare of irritation. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying “what did you do to the wall?”
Lila grabbed my hand and pulled me over, pointing to the biggest rainbow. “That one’s for you,” she said. “I know you have bad days at work, so it’s supposed to make you happy.” Jax puffed out his chest and pointed to a T-Rex with googly eyes that was halfway falling off. “Mine guards the door from bad guys. No monsters can get in now.” I set the groceries down and knelt down to look, and the irritation melted a little, just enough that I could ooh and aah like they wanted. I took a blurry photo with my phone, and they ran off to play with their blocks. That night, after they were in bed, I stood in the entryway picking at a corner of washi tape, thinking about the question my friend had asked me at playgroup the week before: “Do you actually let your kids decorate the whole house? I’d never let mine touch my walls.”
I used to be the person who’d say no too. Before kids, my apartment was all neutral linen, empty wall space, nothing out of place. I thought a home had to look a certain way to be nice. But over the years, I’ve started to see that letting kids add their own marks isn’t just about letting them make a mess. It’s one of the few small ways they get to have real control over their environment. Think about it: kids barely get to make any actual choices all day. What time they get up, what they eat, what clothes they wear, when they go to school, what they learn—all of that is decided by adults. Being able to put up a dinosaur or a rainbow somewhere the whole family sees every day? That’s them practicing making choices, claiming space as part of the family, not just someone who lives here.
After that washi tape incident, I made a few small changes that don’t take any extra time or money, and have stopped almost all the sneaky decor projects that stress me out. First, I marked off free decor zones in the common areas of the house, not just their bedrooms. Kids don’t want to hide their art in their room where no one sees it—they want it where everyone can look at it every day. I drew a faint pencil line 4 feet up the entryway wall, marked the side of the fridge that doesn’t hold our calendar, and the inside of the front hall closet door as all theirs. Anywhere below that line, any time, they can put whatever they want. The line is so faint no guest has ever noticed it, and it gives them clear boundaries so I don’t have to argue about half the stuff they want to put up.
Second, I keep a basket under my coffee table stocked with kid-safe, removable supplies: cheap dollar-store washi tape (not the fancy expensive kind I use for my crafts), reusable adhesive putty, large sticky notes, and peel-and-stick construction paper sheets. They can get it anytime they want, no sneaking my supplies out of the craft closet. Third, if they want to put something up outside their zones, I just ask one question: “Is it temporary?” If it’s for a birthday party or a week of dinosaur obsession, I almost always say yes. Jax had pirate flags taped to the dining room chandelier for 10 days after his birthday, and taking them down took two minutes, no harm done. Fourth, every three months we do a 10-minute decor refresh. We pull everything down, they pick the pieces they still love to put back up, and the rest go into a memory bin under their beds. It keeps the zones from getting so crowded that the tape starts to build up, and it gets them used to sorting through their own things too.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Last month Jax taped a paper shark above the 4-foot line while I was on a work call, and I stepped on a stray roll of washi tape barefoot in the middle of the night last week. Sometimes the tape leaves a faint sticky residue that I have to scrub off when I deep clean the walls. I still get that little flare of irritation sometimes, when I want to take a photo of the house for my sister and the dinosaurs are in the background. But it’s never that big of a deal. A friend came over last month, looked at the dinosaur wall, and said she could never do that—she likes her house too clean. I get it. It’s not for everyone.
Last week, Lila brought home a self portrait she made at art class, with me in it, my hair colored neon pink and the words “BEST MOM” written in purple crayon across the bottom. She taped it right under her big rainbow on the entry wall, centered, so it’s the first thing you see when you walk in the door. I walk past it a dozen times a day. I know that in a few years, they’ll outgrow dinosaurs and neon rainbows, they’ll want different stuff, or they’ll roll their eyes at these messy kid drawings. I still repaint the entry wall every couple of years when it gets too crowded, and I still get to keep the upper half of the walls my soft off-white. For right now, though, the lower half belongs to them. It’s not perfect, it’s a little messy, but it’s ours.
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