Yours, Mine, Our (Bedroom)
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, February 10, 2011 10:54 PM
My whole life, except for a few months during babyhood, I have never had my own bedroom.
It’s true! I shared a room through my whole childhood, then I moved into dorms at college where I had roommates, then I got married. I’ve always had someone else’s breathing to listen to at night.
There were a few grumpy moments during my adolescence when I would have preferred a room of my own, but for the most part I like sharing bedrooms. In fact, during most of my years at home I felt a little sorry for my friends who had their own rooms. I assumed they must get lonely.
These days, the common wisdom seems to be that kids “need” their own bedrooms. I can see some value in that point of view, but I also think sharing a room can be good for kids, if it helps them learn to be considerate of others. Sometimes it’s good for kids to be forced to get along!
In our little family, anyway, we’ve known for a while that room-sharing would be an inevitability. Our house is plenty big for us for now, but the number of bedrooms and the number of people means we have to make the kids share a room, or give up the playroom. The playroom’s toy storage space is a big contributor to parental sanity, so the choice was clear.
As of a week and a half ago, our kids are sleeping in the same bedroom. It’s going well. They seem to like sleeping in the same room. Blaise especially - he was still waking most nights when he was in a crib in his own room, and now sleeps very soundly in a real bed next to his sister’s.
Eventually we’ll have a bigger house, and eventually our girl won’t want to share a room with boys. Eventually things will change, and through our children’s childhoods we’ll continually have to come up with the best solution for the current situation.
But right now I’m loving having my children in the same bedroom, loving peeking around the door before I go to bed to hear them breathing in unison, loving the way Camilla comes into our room each morning to tell us that her brother has awoken (“he talks in my face, Mama!”). It’s the best solution for our family right now, and it’s great that they’re happy.
Do your kids share rooms? Did you? What’s your take on the pros and cons of room-sharing?
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