Why I never tell a child their collection is "too much"

A few weeks ago I was on my knees in a tweens bedroom, sorting through what his mum had started calling "the rock situation."

There were rocks on the windowsill. Rocks under the bed. A shoebox of rocks that had, at some point, been promoted to "the good ones." His mum stood in the doorway looking half amused and half despairing, and asked me the question I get more than almost any other.... Jo is this normal, or is it something we should be worried about?

And this is what I told her, and what I tell every parent who asks me some version of the same thing.

Kids collect. It's one of the most ordinary things they do.

A shell, a football sticker, a slightly interesting stick: to an adult it's clutter, to a child it's evidence. Evidence of a day at the beach, a good trade at school, a walk where something felt worth keeping. Collecting is how a lot of children make sense of the world and hold onto bits of it. For most kids it's a stage. For some it turns into a genuine interest that sticks around for years. Either way, it's not something I treat as a problem to fix.

That doesn't mean every rock stays forever. It means the way we handle it matters more than the rules we set.

With this family, we didn't start with "get rid of most of these." We started by really looking at the collection together, with him in the room, not just talked about while he was at school.

We separated the ones with a story attached (the one from the campsite, the one his nan gave him) from the ones that had just... accumulated.

He got to choose a proper home for the keepers, a specific box, on a specific shelf, with a limit that made sense for the space. The rest went back outside or into the recycling, and because he'd had a say in it, there wasn't a battle.

The bit that actually helps long term isn't the sorting session. It's what happens after. I talked his mum through a simple approach for new things coming in: not "no more rocks," which never works, but a rough one-in, one-out rhythm for the box once it's full, and a quiet word with grandparents about gifts piling up. Small, unglamorous changes. They're the ones that stick.

If you're a parent standing in a bedroom wondering whether your child's collecting, hoarding tendencies, or general reluctance to let go of things means something's wrong, I'd gently say probably not.

Kids attach meaning to objects in ways that don't always make sense to us, and that's fine. What helps is giving that attachment a proper place to live, rather than fighting it or ignoring it until the room's unusable.

If you've got a bedroom (or a whole house) where "the rock situation" has got a bit out of hand and you're not sure where to start, I do this kind of session regularly and I promise there's no judgement involved, just a practical way through it.

Drop me a message and we'll have a chat about what would actually help.