Labeling kids' clothes for preschool

Förskolan expects a name in every garment that comes off during the day: outerwear, rain gear, boots, the spare-clothes set, the hat. Two kids in the same section will own the same navy Polarn O. Pyret mittens, and the staff have no chance of knowing whose is whose. A first name is enough in a small section; first name plus an initial once the section has two Elsas.

The options, honestly: iron-on name labels cost around 100 kronor for fifty and sit through a season of washing if you press them properly, on a hard surface, longer than the instructions dare to say. Stick-on labels work surprisingly well inside a rubber boot and fall off almost everything else. And the free option nobody markets: a laundry marker on the care tag. Ten seconds per garment, survives every wash including förskolan's industrial machines, readable for years. The one drawback shows up when the garment is handed down, since ink cannot be unwritten.

Second-hand and siblings

Hand-me-downs collect names the way a passport collects stamps. Strike through the old name and write the new owner under it; staff read the one that isn't crossed out. For garments you plan to pass on, the iron-on labels earn their price: they peel off with tweezers and a hot iron, and the tag stays clean for the next kid. The same logic is the argument against writing names on the outside of anything you might sell.

The labeling session has a natural rhythm: every size change. When the 98s go out and the 104s come in, the preschool box needs restocking anyway, so mark the whole new set in one sitting with the marker already on the table. Our förskola checklist below lists what the box should hold; going through it twice a year beats discovering the missing rain trousers at drop-off in October.