Even Marie Kondo Stopped Keeping a Tidy House

Marie Kondo built a global career around tidying. Her KonMari Method turned decluttering into bestselling books, a Netflix series, and, for a while, the idea that every object in your home should have a reason to stay.

Then she had three children.

The woman best known for putting homes in order eventually admitted that her own house had become messier and that keeping it perfectly tidy was no longer her priority.

As a mother of two who genuinely enjoys an organized home, that caught my attention. I know exactly how quickly children can destroy a perfectly sensible system. Kondo had simply reached the point where keeping everything tidy all day was no longer worth the effort.

So, did Marie Kondo really give up?

The headlines arrived in January 2023 after Kondo spoke to The Washington Post about her newer approach to home life. She explained that her home was messier and that she had, in a sense, stopped trying to keep it tidy all the time because spending time with her children mattered more at that stage of her life.

For those who do not remember, Marie Kondo is the Japanese organizing expert who taught millions of people to declutter by category rather than room, gather similar belongings together, keep the things they genuinely value, and let go of the rest.

That is why her change sounded so dramatic. But it was not a sudden rejection of everything she had taught.

Her own website now makes the change even clearer. In her reflections on motherhood, Kondo says that after having children, she became more forgiving of herself and accepted that she could not tidy every day. Sometimes the mess stays where it is until the children are asleep.

Honestly, this is the first time Marie Kondo actually makes sense to me.

How Marie Kondo turned tidying into a global phenomenon

Kondo was already a successful tidying consultant in Japan before her ideas became a global phenomenon.

The English edition of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published on October 14, 2014, turning the KonMari Method into one of the best-known approaches to decluttering.

The method was never simply “own fewer things.” Kondo asked people to gather belongings by category, decide what they genuinely wanted to keep, and give those possessions a defined place.

Then came Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix in 2019. Who knew watching strangers fold clothes and clear out garages would turn into an actual TV show?

For a while, people treated her like a lifestyle prophet. The whole philosophy boiled down to one strict rule: if an item didn’t explicitly earn its spot, it had no business being in your house.

That is a difficult reputation to maintain once somebody starts distributing Lego across the living room.

A third child changed her priorities

Kondo had her third child in 2021. By the time Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home was published in November 2022, her message had already widened beyond keeping possessions in order.

Kurashi concerns the way we live our everyday lives. Kondo’s newer work asks readers to think about routines, relationships and the small things that make daily life feel right, rather than treating the perfectly organized room as the final objective.

I don’t find that surprising. Before children, it is quite easy to believe that every household problem needs a sufficiently good system. Then children arrive and begin testing your system as though they have been hired by an independent certification body.

• You put toys in labeled baskets. They empty the baskets.
• You create a place for shoes. Shoes develop ambitions elsewhere.
• You finish tidying the kitchen while somebody is already producing crumbs behind you.

My advice after two children is to stop organizing for the house you wish you had and organize for the way your family actually behaves.

• Put storage where the mess happens. If toys always end up in the living room, that room needs a toy basket.
• Keep categories broad. “Cars” and “blocks” work better with small children than eleven beautifully labeled subcategories.
• Keep baby supplies at the point of use. A small diaper station downstairs saves far more time than returning everything to the nursery.
• Reset once, not constantly. I would rather spend ten minutes putting things back after bedtime than spend the entire afternoon following children around with a basket.

At some point, efficiency has to negotiate with reality. You don’t abandon the system, but rather make the system easier to live with.

Marie Kondo still organizes, just differently

There is a bit of irony here. Kondo becoming less concerned with constant tidiness may be one of the more faithful applications of her own philosophy.

Her explanation of kurashi shifts the question from an ideal home toward an ideal life. Having a clean house is still important, but it is supposed to support the way you want to live rather than become the project around which everything else revolves.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Sure, a spotless living room is nice. But if maintaining it requires chasing three kids around with a storage bin all afternoon, you’re going to lose your mind by 3 PM.

Kondo herself now describes a home where toys sometimes remain out, and tidying happens later. She suggests giving children’s belongings a designated home, while also acknowledging that some days she would rather spend her energy on the children than continually clean up behind them.

The system moved down the priority list. The family moved up.

There is a cost to keeping everything under control

I like an organized home enough that my family can usually tell when I am stressed by how suspiciously neat something becomes.

A mildly difficult day may leave me with a clean kitchen, while a properly stressful one has been known to reorganize the bookshelf.

So I am not going to pretend clutter never bothers me. It does.

There is also some evidence that the way we experience our homes can affect stress.  A UCLA study of 60 dual-income spouses found that wives who described their homes using more words associated with clutter and unfinished projects had flatter daily cortisol patterns and reported more depressed mood as the day progressed.

The study found an association, not proof that clutter itself caused the stress response. UCLA later summarized the findings in its look at clutter and everyday family life.

That doesn’t mean a pile of toys is medically dangerous or that everybody needs empty counters. It does suggest that feeling overwhelmed by your surroundings is not necessarily trivial.

There’s a huge difference between a house that’s drowning in clutter and one that just looks like people actually live in it.

Trying to erase every sign of daily life can become another form of work. There is always another cup to return, another cushion to straighten, another toy to put away and, in my house at least, one glass that nobody remembers using.

I need a system that works for me, not the other way around

Marie Kondo hasn’t turned me into the person who throws clothes on a chair and calls it a day. I like having a place for everything. But if a system is going to survive living with kids, it better be dead simple.

• Keep a basket where the mess actually happens. If the toys always end up in the living room, that is where the basket belongs. I am not carrying animals back upstairs six times a day.
• Put baby supplies where you use them. Keep diapers, wipes, and a change of clothes downstairs if that is where most changes happen.
• Use open bins for everyday toys. If putting something away involves a lid, another box, and three extra steps, it is staying on the floor. Make the easiest option so it can become a habit.
• Do not keep every toy out at once. Put some away and rotate them. There is less to clean up, and old toys somehow become interesting again after disappearing for a while.
• Tidy once at the end of the day. I would rather spend ten minutes putting things back after bedtime than follow children around all afternoon undoing the mess they are still actively making.

That is organized enough for me. A good system should remove work from the day, not quietly become another job.

Maybe all that precise folding was never the point

The funny thing about Marie Kondo giving up on perfection isn’t that she discovered mess; any parent could tell her that.

What changed was her idea of success. Putting things in a designated spot is still important. So does throwing away cabinets full of things you don’t use, if you’re willing to give up a Saturday to do it. I am not.

The point is, I prefer my house clean, but spending half my life keeping it that way is just not worth it.