Establishing Rules for Room-Sharing Siblings
Children Resolve Conflicts and Build Strong Sibling Relationships
Feb 16, 2009
For siblings to share a bedroom peacefully, each child must respect the other child's belongings and space. Generally, the parents of young room-sharing siblings will establish and enforce rules for the children. Older children, however, should be encouraged to negotiate and come up with their own rules for room-sharing.
In The Baffled Parent's Guide to Sibling Rivalry [McGraw-Hill, 2003], Marian Edelman Borden suggests that children go so far as to write down and post a formal list of rules to which all roommates can refer as necessary.
Children Sharing a Bedroom Should Establish Private and Shared Space
The first rule to set up is what space in the room is private and what space will be shared. Each child must have some private space to call his or her own. This space could be as large as half of the room or a whole wall to decorate or as small as a bed, a dresser, or even one drawer or one shelf. Borden notes that any divided room should be split fairly and should often contain a neutral part which both children are allowed to enter. Each child must also have access to such essential parts of the room as the door, a closet, and a window.
Kids Sharing a Room Must Respect Each Other's Belongings
The second rule to establish is which possessions belong to one child only and which are communal property. As Nancy Schulman and Ellen Birnbaum observe in Practical Wisdom for Parents [Alfred A. Knopf, 2007], even room-sharing siblings should be allowed to have some special toys that they are not expected to share. And everything else aside, some toys are just not appropriate or safe for younger siblings to play with.
Children should be given the freedom to work out between themselves a system for how one child is to ask the other to borrow a toy or other possession. When conflicts arise, parents should get involved as little as possible. In fact, William Sears, M.D., Martha Sears, R.N., and Elizabeth Pantley suggest in The Successful Child [Little, Brown and Company, 2002] that often the best thing parents can do is to separate siblings until they have calmed down enough to work together to come up with a solution.
After all, in real life, a child will not always have a parent to intervene and resolve property conflicts for the child, so it is best when siblings sharing a bedroom fight over whether they are both upholding established rules to allow the siblings the space and time needed to settle their differences themselves.
Siblings Establish a Schedule for How the Bedroom is to be Used
A third rule to establish is how the bedroom will be used during different parts of each day. Especially when siblings are older, each child should be guaranteed some private time alone in the room. Sharing and togetherness are beneficial, but children also need peaceful time by themselves with their thoughts (and their favorite music, which may not be as favored by their sibling roommates!).
Borden notes that some families draw up an actual schedule to make it clear when each child can enjoy undisturbed time in a shared bedroom. To keep the peace, all children must also learn the habit of knocking and waiting to be invited into a room before entering it.
In addition, sibling roommates must work out between themselves day-to-day issues such as how late lights can be on in the room and when different kinds of music can be played. To stop fights before they even start, Borden suggests that parents might want to provide each child with a small individual desk light or bed lamp and a personal set of headphones to reduce light and sound disturbances.
To reap the many benefits of sharing a bedroom with a sibling, children must first be able to live somewhat peacefully together. Conflicts will arise, and learning strategies to deal with these conflicts is one of the benefits of living with a sibling. Mutually agreed-upon and fairly followed rules will establish an environment in which strong sibling relationships can develop and flourish.
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