Part and parcel of growing up with siblings are usually sharing a room with them. This does leave parents searching for Tips for Having Kids Share a Room. It’s an age-old tradition that saves space in the home and leads to some (mostly) great childhood memories of bonding with a brother or a sister. Making your kids share a space that helps their development. It teaches them valuable social skills they’ll use for the rest of their lives: sharing, adaptability, socialization, problem-solving, reducing anxiety, etc.
The Chicago Tribune even states that while the home size is growing, more and more families are using rooms for other things (offices, guest bedrooms), and more and more young siblings are cohabitating in the same place.
5 Tips for Having Kids Share a Room
By Candice Shaffer of Urbana Properties, 3550 South Ocean, Central Park Tower, EVGB, Park Loggia, The Chatsworth
Any parent with more than one kid in the house will tell you that siblings sharing a room can sometimes lead to disputes, rivalries, and full-on bedtime shouting matches. There are rare exceptions when little ones are kind and more than happy to share their toys and their space.
Do you want your kids to share a room? Are afraid of some of the negative side of doing so?
Never fear. With these Tips for Having Kids Share a Room, you’ll have peacetime at bedtime when your children share a room.
Planning
Haphazardly throwing two beds into a room and saying, “You sleep there and you sleep there,” isn’t going to work. Making your kids move into the same space as each other takes some planning. Depending on the age gap, your children will have different schedules, sleep times, and interests. So map out their room layout accordingly.
Storage
Next on our list of Tips for Having Kids Share a Room is storage. While your kiddo’s items might be little, there are undoubtedly a lot of them — specifically toys. To create a room where you won’t step on Legos, maximize all of the space in the room. When it comes to storage, think under and up. Store items under the beds in the room and look to vertical shelving to help alleviate clutter. You can also add multiple rods in the closet, so there are different rows for each child.
Privacy
While siblings are bound to love each other — eventually — it’s essential that you let them have time away as well. Instilling a sense of ownership of space in your child is a good thing. To give them a little alone time, create their own private spaces that could be a personal physical space, like a desk or a play area in a corner. Or it could be more of a concept. Perhaps you schedule a time for your child to have the whole room to themselves as long as they clean up.
Cleaning Up
Speaking of cleaning up, keeping a shared room tidy is super important. Your children can be assigned different tasks, like picking up the toys mentioned above, making their beds, or organizing their play space. But let’s face it: parents will be doing most of the maintenance, so make it a pre-bedtime ritual for you and the kids to clean up. A clean or cleanish room will put both you and your children at ease.
Sound
The National Sleep Foundation recommends something that many don’t think of, the ambient sound in the room. To mask heavy breathing or snoring, night talking, sleeping whimpering, or myriad other small but annoying sounds, the Foundation suggests a “fan, air purifier, or dedicated white noise machine can help to muffle noises so everyone sleeps a little more soundly.”
Tips for Having Kids Share a Room
As you can see, having your children share a room can be done successfully. For more positive parenting tips, subscribe to our Newsletter below.
