Creating additional bedrooms

Although there are advantages of two or more children sharing a space, there are also several disadvantages. You can avoid these by creating additional bedrooms, which negates the need for sharing, and encourages independence.
All sorts of issues and conflicts will undoubtedly arise at some point whilst your little (or not so little) ones are sharing a bedroom. I have 2 boys that used to share a room, and these were the main issues I came across:

Different bedtimes.

If there’s a larger age gap between your children (mine were 9 and 5 when they shared), they will more than likely have totally different bedtimes. These different bedtimes become increasingly difficult to enforce and often lead to arguments because “if I have to go to bed, so does he!!”

Tidying the room.

This is a massive problem in a shared room! Neither of my children would take responsibility for tidying the room. Sure, they would tidy their own things away, but ask them why there’s still “stuff” strewn all over the floor and the usual line was “it’s not mine, why should I tidy up his stuff?”

Nightlight issues.

It’s perfectly normal as a kid to be wary of being in the dark, but again, if there’s a larger age gap between your kids, there will be (many) disagreements! Creating additional bedrooms within our current home solved this problem once and for all. The best thing is we didn’t have to move house and uproot the kids from their friends and school.

Homework/music.

The dreaded homework!! It seems like kids are getting homework earlier and earlier at school! Some kids are happy to listen to music whilst doing theirs, whilst others prefer a quiet atmosphere so they can concentrate. If you have one of each, it’s not a good scenario. We tried headphones for my eldest, which worked for a while until he started to sing along to the tunes only he could hear!

Storage space.

Sharing a bedroom is great, but where do all the clothes, toys, games (and other random items) go? It’s difficult finding storage for all these things when there’s only 1 child in a room! Put 2 together and it’s a nightmare! Unless they’re sharing a rather large bedroom that can accommodate double the furniture it’s nigh on impossible!

Having friends round.

This is possibly the hardest situation to deal with. When one of the kids has friends round and wants to be all “cool and grown up” in their bedroom. Obviously the other sibling wants to spend time with everyone too, so what do you do? It’s a shared room so you can’t kick either of them out! This would usually lead to a huge argument, with one or more kids (and possibly adults!) ending up in tears.

The only way to avoid these issues is to separate them so they each have their own bedroom and personal space. Either that or send one of them to boarding school!!