Tessa and Megan Plummer and their parents live in a spacious home in Glastonbury, Conn., but when the time came to shop for big-girl furniture, the sisters chose bunk beds and a shared bedroom.
Their four-bedroom house has plenty of space for each girl to have her own room, but Tessa, 7, and Megan, 5, love using the bunk beds to fly off on pretend vacations with their American Girl dolls. And a thunderstorm at midnight is so much less scary when your sister is nearby.
“Sometimes I want my own room, but we talk at night when we’re falling asleep,” says Tessa, a 2nd-grader.
At a time when families are smaller and houses are bigger, sharing a bedroom can seem as quaint as the dial telephone or the black-and-white TV. Remember the Brady Bunch, the prosperous TV family in which three girls shared one room and three boys shared another?
By choice or necessity, there are still plenty of siblings who bunk together. And many parents agree that sharing a bedroom has helped their children forge a close bond.
“I think they just like the security of knowing the other is there,” says Betsy Palmieri, whose sons, Cam, 5, and Will, 6, share a bedroom in Simsbury.
Cam and Will became roommates as part of a desperation experiment by their parents who were frustrated in their efforts to help the younger boy settle into sleep.
When they rolled Cam’s bed into Will’s room, the sleepless nights finally ended. The move also allowed Palmieri to have a home office and a guestroom in her four-bedroom home.
In addition to offering security, a shared bedroom can instill in children skills that will help them throughout their lives, says Linda Dunlap, a psychology professor at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who has written extensively on family and sibling relationships.
“You learn compromise and negotiation, which bed is yours, which drawers are yours, do you want the shades open or down,” Dunlap says. “Anytime kids have an opportunity to do this, it helps in terms of the future with roommates or apartment mates.”
After sharing a bedroom for eight years, Liz Harwood, 13, is looking ahead with mixed feelings to the day next year when her older sister, Lena, 17, goes off to college.
The girls share a space in their Middletown home that is large enough for a bunk bed and a few dressers, with a narrow aisle of hardwood down the center.
Fostering closeness
It is cramped. And the girls would not have it any other way.
Their mother, Laura Harwood, says the family always planned to add a room to their split-level home so Lena, Liz and their 15-year-old brother, Channing, could have private bedrooms. But finances never allowed it. In retrospect, Harwood says it’s a blessing.
“We don’t eat meals together anymore,” she says, noting that like other families with teenagers, her children are so busy that nobody is ever home at the same time.
“I can be sitting here [in the living room] and hear them laughing [in their room],” Harwood says. “It’s nice they’re so close.”
Lena is applying to college and expects to live away from home next year. When she visited colleges, she says she was not fazed when the guides showed her the tiny dorm rooms with two or three students crammed inside.
“I could picture so many of my friends having to share space and they’d panic,” Lena says. “I thought, `No problem.'”
For her part, Liz says she cannot imagine having the entire room to herself.
Split personalities
The layout of Terri Benoit’s 259-year-old bungalow-style home in Portland sealed the decision to have Kyle, 6 and his sister, Shelby, 5, share a bedroom. With one bedroom on the first floor and two upstairs, it was the only option if the parents were to sleep at what they considered a safe distance from their children.
They painted the small bedroom powder blue and lined the wall above Shelby’s bed with a peel-off Barbie border. Shelby likes to alternate the Barbie pattern with a similar peel-off border decorated with Dora-the-Explorer. Kyle, a rocket enthusiast, is content to keep his Jimmy Neutron border and bedspread year-round.
Dunlap says allowing children to personalize each side of a shared bedroom is a nice way to encourage individuality. “You don’t have to have matching bedspreads,” she says.
And design experts agree. With a neutral wall color and simple window treatments, such as Roman shades, children can easily express their own taste and style without creating a decorating disaster.
Managing space
The most common complaint of parents and siblings who share rooms is a lack of space. In the Benoit house, Shelby’s clothing hangs on a rack outside the shared bedroom door. At the Plummer home, Megan uses a closet in the spare room next door.
The Benoits share most of their toys, which when not in use, are stowed neatly in drawers and plastic bins. At night, each picks a storybook and they snuggle together on one child’s bed to listen as Mom or Dad reads. The venue is different every night, Kyle’s bed one night, Shelby’s the next.
Terri Benoit says she will probably will separate the brother and sister in about two years, as they grow up and she and her husband feel more comfortable allowing them to sleep upstairs when the parents move down.
But she fears the transition may be difficult. Kyle and Shelby have learned to look out for one another. If Shelby is sick or has a nightmare, Kyle will run across the hall to alert his parents.
Most parents interviewed agree the benefits of a shared bedroom outweigh the inconveniences.
“They are close to begin with, but in the morning and the evening, I hear them chatting,” Karen Plummer says of Tessa and Megan. “I have some fond memories of sharing a room with my sister, so I think it is a good experience learning to share space.”
