Kids sharing rooms

[Guineapiggiesmalls]

We have two children, same sex, age 6m and 4. I’m tempted to have them share a room, although we have space for them to each have their own room… is this a bad idea?

I’d use the unused bedroom as a playroom, and I’d happily let them stop sharing when they get older. When I was younger I was always desperate to share a room but I’m not sure if the age gap is too much…

Thank you for this common sense! I’d hoped it would go without saying that I wasn’t planning on dumping the baby in a playroom solo but clearly not 😂

I would wait until the baby is 18 months or so and sleeping through the night consistently. Otherwise, no reason why not

I don't really see what the benefits of them sharing are?

We have ours in separate rooms - they share on holiday and occasionally choose to have sleepovers. But basically sharing always results in disrupted sleep - the little one wakes the older one first thing in the morning and then he is grumpy all day

Get your 4 year old a midsleeper and make their room a nice play space

We are planning for our two with same age gap to share. We do have enough bedrooms but we both want to keep our offices as we both WFH and if we shared we would probably kill each other, and DD1 has been going on and on excitedly about sharing her room with her sister for ages. Will see what the reality is! We have a big playroom downstairs and it's used all the time.

DD1 is an incredibly deep sleeper too which will help!

I have a very similar age gap, DS1 4.5 and DS2 7 months. They share a bedroom upstairs and have a playroom downstairs.

In our case we only have 2 upstairs bedrooms, so I didn't want one child to be sleeping downstairs while the rest of us are upstairs.

Our baby sleeps quite well and our older son sleeps through when he cries. On the nights that's he's playing up I let him co-sleep with me, but most nights they both sleep in their room. It has actually helped my DS1 who used to complain about feeling lonely at bedtime.

The playroom has many choking hazards (Lego,etc) so at the moment it's only for DS1. We have DS2s toys in a playpen in the living room. When DS2 is a bit older he can play safely in the playroom.

For us it works out really well, but it depends on your house layout and kids. How well your baby sleeps will make a huge difference. No harm in giving it a go.

Kids are very adaptable and don't mind sharing till about 10 years old, IME, at which time they become very vocal about wanting a room away from their annoying little brother or sister.