Siblings sharing a bedroom?
So, our 1.5 year old daughter and our 4.5 year old son each have their own bedroom. However, I've been thinking of changing things up a bit so that we have one "sleeping" room and one "play" room. Advantages are that only one room gets really trashed (the playroom) and we could use that for guests. Another advantage is the kids have to learn more about sharing space. Disadvantages are that with two sharing a room, one will wake the other up and vice versa.
Thoughts? I know that sharing rooms is a requirement in smaller homes, so it's certainly do-able. But any advice is appreciated on making it more successful. Or I would also like to hear any reasons against it.
2 Answers
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Our 3.5 year old son and almost 2 year old daughter share a room, and for the most part, I think it works out very well. Many mornings we find either our son quietly playing in the room if our daughter's awake (he gives her toys & books), or out of the room if she's still asleep. Some mornings we find him in her crib laughing and playing together.
When our daughter was under 1 and we tried to have them share a room, we'd find that she would wake him up fairly often so we'd have them share for awhile, and the temporarily have her sleep elsewhere, and then share again. Now it seems like they've mostly hit their stride, and only occasionally interfere with each other's sleep. My hope is that dealing with some noise and demands of sharing a space lets them both be/become more flexible and closer, as long as there is a way for them not to always need to share/be together/go to bed at the same time, etc. A playroom sounds fantastic for these purposes, but I think any space out of the shared bedroom would do.
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Our children share a room. It was a conscience choice since we left an empty guest room/office. Our reasoning is that they are too young to need their own private rooms. and we think that sharing rooms encourages closer sibling relationships.
They have been sharing since the little one was 4 months old (when she was in our room) and are currently 1 and 3.5 years old. If I had to do it all over again, I would have waited until the little was older and better sleep trained. Now we find it very hard to sleep train her. And yes, they do wake each other up at night, especially when they're sick. Some nights it can be extremely frustrating but you just deal with it. I've considered moving one of them out when one or both are sick but we haven't set up the other room in a way that would make that easy. I don't know if it's something you can set up as you're merging rooms. We also find facilitating naps can be difficult in terms of waking each other up, since she takes 2 and he takes 1 and they partially overlap. But your kids are older so maybe those won't be issues. We have not yet found them in the morning playing with each other.
Otherwise it's nice that it's a shared space they have, and we all play together in there sometimes even when we have another play room.
