Knowing whether to allow your little ones to room share; whether they’re begging you every night to share a room, or it’s a necessity, here are our top tips for getting your little ones to successfully share a bedroom.
The basics
- Before you even consider introducing your little ones to the same room you need to ensure they are great sleepers. If not, there will be all sorts of shenanigans and you may find one wakes the other, which won’t help anybody get a good night’s sleep!
- Make sure you set, and stick to, your boundaries. Initially there may be messing around but consider setting a timer for talking and then once it goes off it means no more talking and time for bed.
- If the boundaries are not adhered to, don’t be nervous about considering a consequence if there is a lot of messing about…and be consistent with it!
Bedtime routine
- If bedtime is the same time, you could allow the older child to read the story book to the younger sibling or the parent reads one page and lets the older sibling read the next page.
- Alternately, if one child is much younger than the other and has an earlier bedtime, ensure that child is fully asleep before taking the older one to bed. To avoid disturbing the younger sibling you may need to do parts of the bedtime ‘routine’ such as reading in a another place before the older one goes in their bed.
Bedroom set up
- Ideally you would arrange the room into ‘zones’ so each child has their own ‘sleep space’ in the room. For example, if you have 2 children of different ages, try and rearrange the room so that there is a ‘barrier’ of some sort, perhaps a room partition or chest of drawers turned sideways so that they aren’t distracted by one another at bedtime.
- Often parents of twins have question about whether the twins should share a room, we have a blog post dedicated to twins here (How to help your twins sleep well. – Little Dreams Consulting) so do have a read if this relates to you!
If you are considering your little ones sharing a room but need to get them sleeping well first just get in touch, we would love to help!
