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I used to think I needed a lot of stuff, from toys to clothes and everything in between, just because I had kids.
In a way, it was an excuse in my head. As if having lots of stuff was just part of having kids.
But I’m here to tell you that it’s not.
You don’t need all of that.
How to have a minimalist kids capsule wardrobe
We’ve recently embarked on a minimalism journey.
And I want to share with you everything that I’m learning through it.
Maybe we can declutter together and get some of that sense of calm back into our homes.
In this article, I want to talk to you about kids’ wardrobes and how we have minimised our own kids’ clothes.
Here’s the thing about kids’ clothes. I used to think we needed lots of clothes.
We constantly hear around us that with kids, you need a lot of clothes. You need a lot of changes of clothes. You need to have a lot to go through.
But actually, you really don’t.
I will share with you exactly how we manage to stay on top of things and how life with less is actually easier.
Feel free to keep reading below or watch the video:
Need help with your own wardrobe?
See how I got rid of 80% of my clothing and created a minimalist wardrobe.
How can I reduce my kids wardrobe?
When I became a mum, I had this idea in my head, that having lots of kids’ clothes is just something that comes with having kids.
As if kids attract a lot of things into your house.
But what I have actually come to realise, now that I’ve sat down with myself and done this whole minimalism process, is that it’s not the kids who actually bring clothes into our house.
It’s me. It’s mostly me.
My husband doesn’t really buy a lot of kids’ clothes, maybe one here and there, but it’s usually me.
My kids aren’t the ones who go into the shop and see, ‘Oh, all of these cute items are on sale. I might as well buy a bargain.’
Nope, that’s me again.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still buy cute items and things that I love for my kids because I feel like it’s a joyful thing.
It’s such a lovely part of being a mom, and I love that so much.
But that doesn’t mean I need to have hundreds of different clothes options for them in every single season and for every single age.
Children do grow up quickly, and outgrow their clothes very often.
So we actually do get to change their clothes quite a lot.
We can keep buying cute things as they outgrow old ones, but we can also make it in a way that’s manageable and doesn’t clutter the closet.
How many clothes should kids have?
Nowadays, when I do buy things, I actually go to the shops with a list, with a purpose.
Like when my baby grew into the next size of clothes, my list included things like:
- five tops with long sleeves
- five tops with short sleeves
- five leggings.
Then I looked in shops or on Vinted (I’ve been using it a lot recently, and I love it) for these items, and bought things that were actually needed.
When I go to the shop with a list now, and I see something from my list that’s on sale, I will get it.
That’s when it’s actually a bargain that I’m getting.
But when we’re just going into shops and we’re buying random things here and there, it’s not really a bargain if we already have 20 of those items in our closet already.
Because we’re not gonna get a lot of use out of them.
And I’m not trying to make you feel bad because I was like that too.
I want to share with you a few life-changing hacks that I’ve learned about having a minimalist kids capsule wardrobe.
Tip #1: The life-changing socks tip
I’ve lost count of how many kids’ socks I have lost or how many I had just one of.
One sock from a pair would get lost, and then obviously, the remaining sock couldn’t be worn.
So their sock drawer was usually filled with a lot of different tiny socks, some had pairs, some didn’t, and it was just a mess.
We tackled this recently (and I’ve actually adopted this strategy for myself as well) by buying sets of socks, all the same colour.
Now my baby has six pairs of white socks, all exactly the same, and that’s it.
She doesn’t have more because she doesn’t need more.
My son has a set of seven pairs of socks that are all dark grey, the colour he needs for his school uniform.
And he just wears those all the time, even if he’s not going to school.
I also have in my wardrobe only white socks at the moment, around seven pairs of them.
I know socks can be cute, but honestly, my kids don’t really care about the socks that they wear.
I don’t mind them.
My baby doesn’t.
Even my 6-year-old couldn’t care less about the socks that he wears.
He cares a lot more about t-shirts and things like that, but not socks.
And for each of us, all the socks go in a basket of socks, and they’re all the same.
So when I need socks for my baby, for example, I just go and grab any two because they all match, they’re all the same.
I don’t have to worry if I’m losing one. They just all pair with each other.
Not to be dramatic, but this has been life-changing for me.
When I do laundry, I never have to look for them to pair them together.
I just put all of them back in the drawer. It is just so much easier.
That is one hack that I highly recommend you try if you haven’t already.
Tip #2: The daily wardrobe
My next life-changing tip involves the actual wardrobe or the chest of drawers, whatever you use for their clothing.
Our minimalist kids’ wardrobe that we open every single day to dress them only has items that they actually wear right now, this age, this season.
It fits them, they can wear it, it’s an option.
I used to keep a lot of things in their wardrobe, so it was a mumbo-jumbo, trying to look for things that actually fit them right now.
So I decided to only keep things that are in season, things that they actually wear right now.
Other things, like a bigger winter coat, are put away in a box for out-of-season items.
Also, anything that’s not the right size yet goes in storage.
What they have in their wardrobe at the moment are all things that they actually wear right now.
Doing this makes it much easier when I open the wardrobe in the morning because everything in there is an option. It’s so much easier to dress them.
Plus, it’s so much easier for them to go and get themselves dressed as well.
Tip #3: The laundry routine
We have gotten into the habit of putting on a load of laundry pretty much every single day.
Some days we wake up, and the laundry basket is empty, so I don’t need to do anything.
But most days, I put on a load of laundry, and it helps so much.
I put the washing machine on very early in the morning – you could even schedule it if you wanted to.
And then by 7 A.M, the laundry is done. I can just hang it to dry either outside or inside, and then by the end of the day, it’s usually dry, and I’ll put it away.
This routine makes things so much easier, rather than having piles and piles of laundry.
It just feels manageable.
There are never piles of clothes anywhere in the house anymore, and no clothes thrown on the floor.
It’s amazing what a minimised wardrobe can do for your mental health as well, because as a mom, just seeing those piles of clothes can be so stressful.
If you were to see my kids’ wardrobes now, you might think:
‘Oh, that’s way too little clothes. I’m not going to be able to get by. They’ll get dirty, and then I won’t have enough spare clothes for them.’
Here’s the thing:
Since minimising their closets (which was kind of an experiment to see how we would get on), I have found that we never ran out of clothes for them.
Doing the daily laundry routine helps a lot.
Also, for example, my baby has 4 pyjamas, 5 long-sleeve tops and 5 leggings.
If we happen to run out of, let’s say, tops and leggings and I don’t have any clean for her for some reason, I can always just put her in one of the pyjamas, and she’ll be fine.
She can go a day in that, she doesn’t care if she’s wearing a T-shirt or a pyjama.
It’s the same with my son. If he really runs out of all the long-sleeve shirts (which has never happened, to be honest), if they’re all dirty for whatever reason, we can always go with a t-shirt instead of a long-sleeve. And with a hoodie on top, he’ll be fine.
So there are always options to go with, even if you run out of clean clothes in one category.
But again, that has actually never happened to us, and we don’t have mountains of clothing for them.
Keep in mind: Buying more is easy, getting rid is hard
I learned that it is so much easier to buy things and to get something if you realise you need more.
For example, I realised the other day that we didn’t have enough leggings for my baby, so we needed to buy some more.
She had outgrown her previous ones, I had donated them, and then I realised, ‘Oh, we only have 2 now that actually fit her. Let’s go and buy some more’.
It’s so easy to go and buy something.
We have so many shops around us, plus all the online shops we can order from. Or Vinted, where you can buy pre-loved great condition clothes for a real bargain.
It’s interesting that we have so many opportunities to buy and bring stuff into our house, and yet it can be so hard for us to let go, to declutter and to get things out of our house.
So if you realise that you’ve minimised the wardrobe, but you or your child actually need a couple more leggings for example, you can always go and buy some more.
And the ones that you’ve decluttered, you’ve probably donated or given them to somebody else who can make use of them, so it wasn’t a waste.
Tip #4: The hand-me-downs and storage items
The one other thing that might be a bit controversial (or unpopular) is that we don’t actually keep a lot of hand-me-downs these days from one child to the next.
I don’t know if it has something to do with the journey that we’ve been on with infertility.
I used to keep a lot of things from my son as he was growing up. I kept them in storage, thinking, ‘We might have a baby one day, so let’s keep these clothes.’
Then, when my son was 3 years old, we were supposed to have a baby, and I had a miscarriage.
Another 3 early miscarriages followed.
With every single one, the thought of having a baby went further and further away from me.
So we started donating some of the things we had kept because it was too painful to hold on to them.
Now we have our baby daughter.
And I have actually found, from my son’s old clothes that we did keep, that a lot of them won’t fit her because they’re not in the right season.
They don’t overlap.
Plus, she’s tinier than he was at the same age. So a lot of his baby clothes just didn’t fit her.
We ended up getting rid of them after having stored them for over 5 years.
And to me, that feels like a waste because somebody else could have used all of those clothes in the meantime, and we just kept them in storage.
Because there’s quite a big age gap between them (over 5 years), she will have her own preferences as she grows up. She might not want to actually wear the clothes that were my son’s.
What to do with outgrown kids clothes?
These above are the reasons why we have decided not to keep a lot of hand-me-downs anymore from my son for my daughter.
What we decided to keep are some school uniform basics (as they’ll likely go to the same school) and a few other things (not a lot), and we keep them in a couple of storage boxes.
I also felt like it had become a big mental load to have everything labelled, to know where everything is as my baby is growing, and to try and locate the exact hand-me-down clothes that might fit her.
I would have to go through boxes of clothes, and I’d do that multiple times, to see which clothes fit her right now, and which ones not yet.
Months later, I would go through this process again.
And this just felt like a lot of mental load that I was carrying around.
So instead of something that felt stressful to me, I find it much easier to just go on Vinted and get a real bargain.
I can find a set of 5 baby clothes for £4 or something like that.
It’s really affordable, and a lot of the baby clothes are in great condition. A lot of them haven’t even been used.
The clothes she outgrows, I’ll either donate or sell on Vinted.
And then I’ll just buy her the next size up.
This process feels much easier on my mental load, rather than having a whole bunch of clothing in storage that I have to constantly go through, look for, and keep track of what’s where.
This way somebody else is now enjoying the clothes my kids have outgrown.
I hope you found this post on how to have a minimalist kids capsule wardrobe helpful.
Let me know if you are on a similar decluttering journey as I am!
