Avoid Sticky Travels: How to Keep Your Car Clean With Kids

When you have kids, keeping your car clean can be a difficult task. Between sticky snacks, dirty shoes, and the chaos that surrounds trips in the car, it’s no secret your family vehicle can get messy from time to time. But it’s important to keep your car clean. The average car has 17,000 times more bacteria than the average home, giving it plenty of opportunities to get you or your kids sick. Your car doesn’t need to be sparkling, but you should scrub it down every so often. Here are five tips to keep your car clean.

Keep Snacks Organized

If your kids get hungry during errands, you should keep some neatly-organized snacks in your car. Buy some organizers and use those to keep the snacks contained. This will keep them from breaking or scattering all over the car, resulting in crumbs and half-eaten snacks building up on the floor. As a bonus, keeping food in the car can help you save money. If you stop at the ATM to get cash for snacks, you might be like the average person and spend 20 to 25% more in convenience stores than you planned to. So stash some food in the car for a cheaper, cleaner snack.

Keep Kid-Safe Multipurpose Cleaner On Hand

Think of your family vehicle like a plane that takes frequent trips from Point A to Point B. Over 24 million flight hours are logged every year, and yet somehow planes are able to stay clean. Ever wonder how? Between flights, crews will use heavy-duty cleaners and disinfectants to keep germs at bay and surfaces clean. Take this idea and fit it into your car. Keep child-safe multicleaner on hand but out of your child’s reach such as on the floor of your passenger seat or in the trunk. Disinfecting wipes can also be kept in your glove compartment. By having these cleaning materials on hand, you can help to keep your car clean and disinfected between “flights” of your own.

Use Floor Mats

Your car’s floors are the most likely to get really dirty. Whether it is from mud tracking on the bottoms of shoes or snacks falling on the floor, keeping the carpet of your car clean can be next to impossible. Use floor mats to help make cleanup easier. While you might not be able to prevent the mess from happening, keeping it contained to the mats allows you to pull the mats out and wipe them off. This way, you don’t need to worry about vacuuming as often or trying to get sticky substances off of the car floor before they’re tracked inside your house.

Store Your Trash

Have a way to store trash in your car so that it doesn’t end up littered all over the seats and floor. There are many ways to do this. One popular method is to keep a plastic garbage bag in your car. You can just put your trash inside and swap it out when it gets full. If a trash bag is too big for your car, you can look into other options that are smaller and easier to tuck aside. Regardless, if you have one place for trash to go, you won’t need to worry about food wrappers and napkins getting the whole car dirty.

When you have kids in your car, you need to expect that they’ll get it dirty. However, it doesn’t need to stay that way. With some planning ahead, you can keep trash and food from piling up. Then you can take some time to do small cleaning tasks every week. If you follow these tips, you won’t need to keep doing occasional deep cleanings because the dirt got out of hand again. You’ll be able to keep your car consistently clean, even with kids.