Housing Crisis - 5 in a two bed flat

christ they hardly to come to visit as it without them having to pay £200 a night to stay somewhere!! No, I'm not suggesting that's why people are living in cramped conditions, it was in response to the question as to why someone might need a 4 or 5 bedroom house if they had 2 kids!

Doesn't happen now, at least not where I live. There's 24000 people on the list for housing and your only hope of getting a larger house, is to swap with someone else. That's what I'm trying to do.

To those who are saying why have more kids if you don't have room to house them? On the Estate where I'm from, it was usually so that they could get a bigger house. Judgy I know but it happened! Don't think it happens now though but may be wrong.

Friends and family stay in hotels surely! Are you suggesting people are living in cramped conditions because they don’t have a study or guest room

Until very recently this was completely standard. My dad had 5 brothers all in one room. We are living in very unusual times and geography to think everyone needs their own room

But surely this is on the parents? If you don’t have space for more kids why are you having them! It is your responsibility to feed and house your children!

debatable....if you WFH you need a space to WFH, if you have friends and family who aren't local then it's nice to have somewhere for them to be able to stay. If your kids are different genders then they're going to want their own rooms, or maybe one child's bedroom isn't large enough to be shared....

3 kids in 1 room is fine if same sex. If not parents can sleep in living room….
I know a family of 7, almost 8 in a 2 bed flat. They will get a 4 bed house eventually but still… girls room, boys room, parents in living room. It’s a workable solution.

Surely that's a "want" rather than a "need".

master bedroom, 2 kids bedrooms, guest room, and home office?

Friends of mine ended up in this situation. They were planning on moving after their second was born and then the financial crash in 2007 prevented them from moving. They then had an unplanned pregnancy so had 3 in a tiny 2 bedroom flat. They finally managed to move a number of years later to a 3 bedroom house which offered scope to extend into the attic.

Brought up in a 2 bed, mo bathroom, outside toilet. We then became 5 so moved to a larger 2 bed, outside toilet, split bedrooms to make 3 and 1 bathroom. Certainly never felt deprived. When I got married moved to a 2 bed with no central heating, was freezing!
Had a happy childhood, good food, proper parenting and playing out ... hopscotch and elastics.

Now live (2 of us) in a 4 bed 3.5 bathroom house. Times have certainly changed ... larger house diesnt necessarily make you happier.

There were 5 of us in a 3 bed when I was a child/teen (2 double bedrooms, and 1 box room). I think that’s fairly standard. However, by the age of 15ish I had got so sick of sharing with my sister and fighting over space, and my parents were so aggravated by the constant bickering, that I was moved into the dining room (5 of us trying to eat our dinner all hunched around a 2-person bistro table in the kitchen was quite a sight to behold).

My friend and her husband have 2 daughters in a 1 bedroom flat. The kids have the bedroom and friend and her husband have a sofabed in the kitchen/living area. They also have another baby on the way… But they’ve chosen to stay put because the rent is obviously much lower than a 2/3 bed. They could afford to move which is what baffles me.
I completely understand that circumstances change, and sadly sometimes people have no choice but to live in an overcrowded property; but I do scratch my head at those who already live in a cramped property and think it’s a good idea to make their family even bigger, I would feel like I’m purposely depriving my children of their own space and privacy?

I don’t think 2 children sharing a bedroom is a big issue at all. I’ve got a 3 bed house, we would originally have had enough space for all of us to have enough room but then I unexpectedly feel pregnant with twins so our DC will have to share for the foreseeable until we can do an extension. It’s not the end of the world! We just have less things than other people so that we have space for it, and I much prefer that

@TheEllisGreyMethod
why on earth would you need a 4 or 5 bedroom house with 2 children? That’s just bonkers!

Oh, and as far as I understand it, the Council don't consider you overcrowded unless you've got kids of opposite gender sharing, past the age of 7. I'm not sure how many of each you can have in a room.... I guess if you had 10 kids, in a 3 bed Council property, they'd be looking to re-house you.
My Mum was one of 7 kids. She and her sister came off best, as they got a room between 2, when the boys had one between 5!!

I genuinely don't get the whole panic about kids sharing rooms!
At one point, we lived in a small 3 bed house, with mum, dad, my sister, brother, me, and an extended family member (for about a year.)
Normally we were bed 1 - mum & dad, bed 2 - sister & me, bed 3 - brother. But, when the family member came, they got my brother's room, which meant sister and I were in a double bed, and brother in a cabin/bunk bed, in the same room. We were aged about 7 - 11 at the time. No-one batted an eyelid.
Whilst I wouldn't have done that by choice, our family member would otherwise have been homeless, so that's how it was. Probably couldn't have gone on longer than it did, because my sister was getting older, etc. We went back to us two girls sharing, until we moved to a slightly bigger place when I was about 12 (I am the middle child.)

The whole 'a bedroom for each child, and one spare' is a much more modern, middle-class, approach, I think. People we knew who had that seemed much better off than we were. I think we were completely average (one parent was a nurse, the other a teacher.)

Growing up there was me, my parents, one brother and two sisters all living in a one bedroom flat.

I mean the overall theme to this is people having large amounts of kids. Obviously someone with 5 or 7 kids will struggle to give them all rooms.
I have one DC, probably won't have another because id really need a 4 or 5 bed house then.

My MIL brought up 4 children in a small, 2-bed council house.

They had two boys when they moved in, a 1YO and a baby, and she had a daughter when boy 2 was around 6. The daughter slept in her parents' bedroom until she was 2-3, when MIL had a 4th, another girl.

They moved the boys into the bigger bedroom and FIL put a partition wall down the middle of it to divide it into two, so sons and daughter were separated, although the boys had to walk through the girl's room to get to theirs. Then DD2 was moved into the room with her sister. They all slept in bunk beds until they left home.

The council would happily have rehoused them into a bigger place, but MIL loved the area, had created a beautiful garden that she would have hated to leave, and had loads of friends locally and didn't want to move. DP and his brother didn't have their own bedrooms until they left home.

MIL now lives alone in the same house, the partition has been removed and she has the big bedroom all to her self.

Agreed. My 2 DC had separate bedrooms, and so did my brother and I, and we are all still close as adults. You don't have to share a bedroom to be close to a sibling. Indeed, as you say, there is more likely to be resentment and fights as they have no personal space.

People just had less stuff in the olden days. I look back and think of my children’s bedrooms compared to what my sister and I had in our shared bedroom.
You had a doll each that was it, one doll for one child
Mine had the entire collection of Disney princesses so what’s that 15 of them? Plus clothes plus carriage plus Sylvanian families plus littlest pet shop plus baby born it was actual madness

I tbink my feelings towards the situation would depend on what the parent/parents were doing to help ameliorate things for themselves and their children.

It depends, I know family in 2 bedroom flat with 4 kids- parents sleep on the sofa in the living room, 2 boys and 2 girls share bedrooms. However, they have zero clutter, and are very organised. You wouldn't believe 6 people live there.

I’m not saying it costs the same - just that the expenses associated with moving are too much for my bestie right now.