Should I Let My Kids Decorate the Home? A Parent’s Real Experience and Practical Tips
I hauled two overflowing grocery bags through the front door last month, cold sweat already running down my back because I remembered we were supposed to have the house picked up for my in-laws’ arrival that evening. The first thing I saw was a 3-foot glitter rainbow taped to my brand-new off-white entry wall, flanked by two construction paper T-Rexes with googly eyes that hung lopsided off the trim. My two kids, 7-year-old Lila and 9-year-old Jax, froze mid-taping a hand-drawn welcome sign, washi tape still dangling from Lila’s hand. “We made it for Grandma,” Jax mumbled, already reaching to yank the first dinosaur down.
I almost snapped. I’d reminded them twice that morning not to tape anything new to the walls before guests came. But I stopped, because three months before that, at Jax’s parent-teacher conference, his teacher had pulled me aside and said he rarely puts his art up on the classroom bulletin board. When she asked why, he told her “my mom only has room for the good art on our fridge, and mine’s not good enough.” That line stuck with me. I’d always prided myself on displaying their work, but I had unspoken rules: only the very best pieces made the fridge, nothing got taped to the walls, all extra art went into a storage bin in the closet after a week. I thought I was keeping the house neat. I didn’t realize I was telling him his work didn’t belong in our home, the place he lives every day.
So I set the groceries down, the milk was leaking a little through the bag onto the entry floor, and I leaned in to look at their work. Lila pointed out each stripe on the rainbow: one for each of Grandma’s three cats, she said. Jax’s T-Rex had a tiny hand-drawn top hat, because Grandma once told us she wore a dinosaur hat to her high school prom. I told them it looked great, and we left it up. When Grandma walked in that night, she pulled out her phone and took six photos, then asked if she could take the welcome sign home to put on her own fridge. It came down a week later, no damage to the paint, just a little glitter I vacuumed up off the floor.
After that, we made small, low-effort changes to our routine that work for all of us. I didn’t open up the whole house to full-on kid decoration—that would have driven me crazy, honestly. Instead, we carved out specific spaces and set clear, simple rules that don’t require constant negotiation. First, we cleared the small stretch of wall behind our living room couch, the part that no guest ever really notices unless they’re sitting on the couch, and hung a $12 roll of peel-and-stick chalkboard wallpaper there. That’s their permanent kid wall. Any art, any drawing, any tape, any poster goes there, no questions asked. I keep a 3-pack of cheap washi tape in the junk drawer just for them—washi comes off cleanly, no paint peeling, no sticky residue, and it’s $2 a pack at the dollar store, so I don’t care if they go through a roll a month.
For the work they want guests to see, we hung a $10 cork board at kid height right next to our front door, that’s our rotating feature spot. They change it out every week or two; right now it’s got Lila’s rock collection glued to cardboard and Jax’s ticket stub from his first soccer game up there. If they want to put something up somewhere else for a party or a holiday, they just have to ask first, they know they can only use washi, and it has to come down within a week. That’s the only rules we have. No big arguments, no constant cleaning, just clear boundaries.
What’s the thing no one talks about when they talk about kids decorating the house? It’s not just about mess or keeping kids busy. It’s about belonging. A lot of us spend so much time making our homes look “done” or nice for other people that we forget the people who live here most are the kids. They don’t care if the walls are perfectly matchy-matchy. They care that the drawing they spent an hour on after school, the poster of their favorite player, the rock collection they spent all summer hunting for has a spot where everyone can see it. I used to get so stressed out when people came over, shoving all their kid stuff in closets, but now most people comment on the cork board by the door, and half of them say they wish they’d made space for something like that when their kids were small.
Of course it’s not all perfect. I still find glitter on my bath towel two months after Lila did a glitter project for Halloween. Last month Jax taped a giant poster of his favorite soccer player above the dining table without asking, and I did have to ask him to take it down a day early because we had a work call at the table. We still have disagreements sometimes. I draw the line at stickers on the TV or drawing on the kitchen cabinets, and that’s that. It’s not a free for all, it’s just giving them a little bit of space that’s theirs, in the house that’s supposed to be theirs too.
The other week a friend came over, looked at the smudged, marker-covered chalkboard wall behind the couch, and said she could never let her kids do that—she worked too hard to make her house look nice. I didn’t argue with her. It’s not for everyone. For me, though, I’d rather have a few smudges on a wall and know my kids think this is their home, too, than have a perfectly clean house that feels like a showroom no one is allowed to actually live in. We’re still figuring it out; some weeks they forget the kid wall even exists and other weeks they rearrange it every other day. The glitter is still here, stray googly eyes sometimes roll under the couch, and that’s fine with me, for now.
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