Toy management is serious business: Mastering the advanced techniques required to keep order between fun-loving young souls and adults who love to lavish them with gifts is well worth your time. You can keep your playroom and its players on track with three key steps:

1. Purge: Many kids are in total toy overload. But as sentimental as each gift from a doting grandparent may be, kids outgrow toys. Keeping extra or obsolete toys encourages bad habits and wastes space. Take the plunge and purge the playroom today.

Depending on your children's ages and the toys involved, you may approach the task with each child individually or do the whole family in one fell swoop. Sort toys and games by type, directing cast-offs to trash, donation, or garage sale piles as you go. But remember to approach the task gently: Never make children get rid of toys before they're emotionally ready.

2. Contain: Enclosing toys in containers keeps them from becoming clutter and accustoms kids to looking for things in their place and putting them back later. Match the container to the type of toy and age of the users. Colored open crates can hold large toys for small toddlers. Clear, pullout drawers suit smaller items and make seeing what's inside easy. Containers with tight-fitting lids keep smaller children out of older children's toys — especially those dangerously small accessories.

3. Rotate: Even after your purge, you'll probably have more toys than your children can play with at once. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so prolong the appeal of toys and games by rotating your active stock. Divide the toys into different groups so that the sum of one group from each type will leave your playroom well-stocked. Box up the remaining sets and store them out of child's sight and mind.

When your kids tire of the playroom repertoire, it's time for the switcheroo. Enlist kids to pack up the old toys before bringing out the new batch, or make the change quietly yourself one night. Surprise!