Keeping your home clean and tidy when you have young children can be extremely challenging. Here are three tips which might make it a little bit easier.

Encourage your children to tidy after themselves

One of the biggest mistakes many parents make is not encouraging their children to tidy up after themselves. If you take this approach, you will probably find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the amount of mess that needs to be cleaned up each day, and your children will not learn the value of taking care of their belongings.

As such, for your own sake and for the sake of your children, it's important to teach them to tidy up.

Make sure to be as specific as possible when assigning them a chore, as young children tend to struggle to follow vague instructions. For example, rather than telling them to clean up their rooms, you might want to tell them to make their beds and put their toys into their storage cupboard.

Get the carpets professionally steam-cleaned

If you have young children, it can be next to impossible to keep your carpets in pristine condition. Children often spill their food and drink, track mud into the house after playing outdoors and leave crayon or marker stains on the carpet after using colouring books.

This can leave your carpets sticky, smelly, and covered in deeply-ingrained grime. Unfortunately, most standard household cleaning products are not powerful enough to fully remove this type of dirt.

As such, this is a chore which is best left to a professional cleaner who offers carpet steam cleaning services. This individual will use a commercial-grade steaming device to soften and then extract the malodorous stains and dried-on dirt on your home's carpets.

Getting your carpets professionally steam-cleaned on a regular basis will ensure that they never reach the stage where they are unsightly or unhygienic.

Wake up 20 minutes earlier than your children each morning

If you're like most parents, you have probably found that after your children have woken up, all of your time is spent feeding and looking after them. This means that many non-essential household chores can get postponed for days on end; this, in turn, can leave your home looking decidedly messy.

One way to resolve this issue is to get into the habit of waking up about 20 minutes earlier than your children each morning and spending this time catching up on basic chores, such as emptying the dishwasher, wiping down the kitchen counters or cleaning the bathroom.

You might be surprised at how much you can achieve during this short period of time when your children aren't around to distract you.

This approach will help you to maintain a relatively clean and tidy home, without having to sacrifice quality time with your family.