How many clothes do children need?

I lurk in a few decluttering and organising groups on Facebook, and I was really interested in a graphic that I saw shared recently several times. I won't reproduce it on my blog, but you can view and print it here - How much clothing do kids need?

It has a table which gives each category a description - Minimalist, Moderate and Plenty. There's a suggested number of items for each type of clothing, for example shirts, sweaters, pajamas, dresses and shoes, and I was really interested to compare the amount clothing that mine have to the charts.

I always feel that the children have too many clothes. I wash quite frequently and so the only time that they need clothes for more than a few days is when we go on holiday. Perhaps I don't allocate enough space in their wardrobes for clothing, but Mia's drawers in particular always seem to be jammed full. I find that if there is plenty of space in the drawers it's much easier to put clean washing away rather than leave it piled up, so I much prefer to have less.

We are often lucky enough to be given clothes, both new and second hand, and I don't feel that I buy them a huge amount of clothing. I usually pick up bits in the sale, buying extra underwear when we are about to go away and I realise they don't have enough.

So according to the list, I think that my children fall somewhere in between Minimalist and Moderate. They have a few more tops, because I like to have 7 to 10 to allow for a couple of weeks away. I struggle with finding them trousers that fit, so they don't have very many of those anyway. One area where we are way over though is dresses as Mia has ended up with quite a few - especially when you take into consideration her sizable collection of princess outfits! She does wear them all regularly so I don't mind!

Each of them have plenty of pairs of pajamas because they like to have varying thicknesses and a combination of long and short to allow for seasonal variation - they'll often change a couple of times during the evening before they go to sleep! They also have more underwear - it's cheap and it doesn't take up too much space!

I like to think that they are quite limited when it comes to shoes, but they each have a pair of school shoes, trainers, slip on shoes, wellies, sandals, flip flops for swimming and crocs for the garden, and Mia has a couple of pairs of sparkly party shoes - placing them well into the Plenty category!

During the week in term time they are wearing school uniform, which this chart doesn't take account of, and as their uniform is kept separately I don't really count it as part of their clothing. In terms of uniform they each have a clean shirt for every day and one spare, two jumpers, then Harry has two pairs of trousers and two pairs of shorts and Mia has two tunics and two summer dresses. They are generally quite clean children, and I've never had to do an emergency wash because they didn't have clean uniform for school the next day, so we've managed with that amount so far.

What do you think of the graphic? Where do your children fit?