This Simple Hack Will Make Sure Your Kids Stop Misplacing Their Hairbrush

Kids misplace things all the time. They also don’t care about being on time. These two factors mean that parents spend lots of their time searching the house, the car, and even the yard for items that never made it back to their assigned spots. Every parent knows this pain, which is why one dad’s clever hack to stop searching for his daughter’s hairbrush every day quickly went viral.

Mike Thiessen, a dad from Alberta, Canada, posted two pictures to Facebook last week with the caption “When you’re sick of the kids losing the brush everyday.” The first one shows his daughter holding up her hairbrush with a look somewhere between dismayed and annoyed plastered on her face. The second picture shows the mechanism Thiessen came up with: a metal chain attached to the end of the brush and connected to an eye hook screwed into the frame around the bathroom door.

It’s the same technology banks have been using to keep you from stealing their pens for years, repurposed to make hectic mornings go that much more smoothly. And while his daughter doesn’t seem too happy about the innovation, plenty of parents online love it (and are wondering why they didn’t think of it first).

Thiessen’s original post has been shared over 169,000 times. Many of the 30,000 comments are people tagging their spouses, the people who share their pain searching for everyday items. Others mention other items, including lip balm and remote controls, that they’d like to tie down, never to be lost again.

You don’t want to overdo it, turning your house into an unnavigable maze of overlapping chains, but for items like hairbrushes that your kids use (and therefore lose) ever day Thiessen’s hack makes a lot of sense.