Should Your Kids Share a Room?

I have two children; once my youngest weaned and needed to move out of our bedroom, we chose to have her share with her big brother. While this setup doesn’t work for everyone, it has been an absolutely beautiful part of our family. I’m here to help you decide: Should your kids share a room?

Our Background

We live in a small house and have two kids, currently aged five and a half, and the youngest is a bit over three years old. The three year old, my daughter, slept in our bed and breastfed until she was about three years old; when we weaned her, we moved her out of our room at the same time to minimize her being confused. This seems mean but it actually worked well, since she’d always associate my bed with getting to nurse to sleep.

Our kids had to share a room due to us having no more bedrooms to spare, so they each got their bed set up in the same room. We’ve seen many benefits since moving them in together.

Benefits When Your Kids Share a Room

There are two major benefits when your kids share a room: They sleep better, and their junk takes up less space!

My two children literally cuddle with each other in the night. They fall asleep faster. They keep each other warm and comfort each other if one wakes up with a bad dream. While we still use a baby monitor (and I sometimes think we always will as I don’t like being without it!), bedtime and night wakings are both much easier.

And while our kids have a playroom (you can take a tour here!), all of their books and clothes and coats and shoes and stuffed animals are in their bedroom. They can do quiet time in their bedroom with non-over-stimulating activities, and it allows us to keep toys in one place and all their other stuff in their bedroom. And we make this work with only a 1600 sq. ft. house!

Challenges When Your Kids Share a Room

Of course, it wouldn’t be fair for me to just list all the great things about our kids being in a bedroom together. We’ve worked through these challenges really well but there are some things to think about.

Firstly, do your kids keep each other awake? This to me would be the big deciding factor in whether or not your kids should share a room. If they go to bed at different times, or one likes lots of noise machine and the other needs silence, sharing a room would be a huge challenge.

And if you’d like to know the difference between nightmares and night terrors, and how to help your child, click here.

Additionally, if you have one kid who has to get up for school, and one who doesn’t, it might be tricky to wake one but not the other. I take my oldest to school by car, so I have to wake up both anyway; for us, this situation is not an issue. If you’d like to see what our daily schedule looks like, click here.

Finally, keep in mind that your kids will be changing their clothes in their room. So if your kids identify as two different genders, there will come a point when they will want privacy. (My kids still take a bath together and while we talk about their body parts appropriately, they’re not at the point that they gape at each other and they don’t mind being in the same room when getting changed.)

Things to Think About When Your Kids Share a Room

Finally, I wanted to give you a few suggestions to think about as you plan to put your kids in the same room.

Really we’re just thinking long-term here: Since we have a boy and a girl, there will come a time (hello puberty) that our kids will each need to have their own sacred space. So we will either need to move things around or get a different house when that time comes.

Additionally, we like the idea of setting up boundaries for the bedroom. For example, our kids don’t really need to take their friends into their bedroom right now; there aren’t any toys in there, and it’s a lot harder to monitor our kids with friends over. So they play with their buddies in the playroom only.

Has this given you some insight into whether or not your kids should share a room? I hope so! Whatever you choose, let this information help you make the right decision for your family. And let me know about your experience! 

If you’d like to see how we help our kids learn to play together, click here.

And if you’d like to see how to tell a great bedtime story for your kids, click here.