Sharing a Bedroom

For some reason, I saw a news piece on Jon and Kate Plus 8 today and thought, “I wonder if those kids have to share bedrooms?” (To clarify, the surprising thing about that thought was not seeing a news piece. They’re all over the news. It was that the thought never occurred to me before.) Can you imagine sharing your bedroom with not just one, but three or four siblings? We only shared with one sibling growing up and it was still tough at times. (Nothing earth shattering…I wanted to read and my sister wanted to sleep or my brother objected to having the younger one snitch his army men and hack off their fingers to make sausages for his action figures.) Then, there were times we loved sharing our rooms. Like when one of us had a bad dream and would wake up and see we weren’t alone. Or when we wanted to whisper and giggle to each other in the dark.

To successfully share a bedroom, kids should be fairly close in age, should not loathe each other and should each have some private space in the room. One thing that seemed to work well for us was creating a “wall” in the room by positioning bureaus or desks at the halfway point. Another option is to create a mental divider. Put down two large throw rugs in complementary colors and then paint matching walls and choose matching bedspreads for each side of the room.

Did you share a room growing up? Are you glad you did?

Photo: SXC